DOC: does the copyright year need to be updated?

[mengxingbw]

Issue with current documentation:

Randomly noticed that currently the copyright lines still say "# Copyright 2024 - present The PyMC Developers"

Do these need to be updated to 2026?

Idea or request for content:

No response

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[ricardoV94]

There's a pre commot hook we use in pymc that we should use here to do it automatically. There may be some discussion about this somewhere in the PyTensor repo already

[Laks04]

Hi, I would like to work on this issue.

Should I update the copyright year manually across files,
or is this expected to be handled via the pre-commit hook mentioned?

Please let me know the preferred approach.

[ricardoV94]

pre-commit should handle it

[Laks04]

Thanks for the clarification!
In that case, would you recommend closing this issue, or should I look into improving the pre-commit configuration or documentation related to this?

[ayushunhale10-code]

Hi @ricardoV94 — I'd like to help move this forward. I can look into the pre-commit hook configuration and add the copyright-year check to the existing .pre-commit-config.yaml so it automatically updates going forward. This would be a small but useful addition. Would that be a worthwhile contribution?

[mbaldourw]

apologies for my confusion. pymc does have this pre-commit hook:

- repo: https://github.com/lucianopaz/head_of_apache
  rev: "0.1.1"
  hooks:
    - id: head_of_apache
      args:
        - --author=The PyMC Developers
        - --exclude=docs/
        - --exclude=scripts/
        - --exclude=binder/
        - --exclude=versioneer.py
        - --last-year-present```xx`

so what I read "# Copyright 2024 - present " is actually right. The "- present" takes care of the copyright I guess.

On the other hand, in pytensor, it doesn't seem like this is automated in pre-commit hooks as of now. This is in doc/conf.py:

# General substitutions.
project = "PyTensor"
copyright = "PyMC Team 2022-present,2020-2021; Aesara Developers, 2021-2022; LISA Lab, 2008--2019"

doc/internal/how_to_release.rst:

Update the version number
=========================

``PyTensor/doc/conf.py`` should be updated in the following ways:

 * Change the upper copyright year to the current year if necessary.

Update the year in the ``PyTensor/LICENSE.txt`` file too, if necessary.

So we could add the head_of_apache hook to pytensor. Note that in pytensor, as of now most .py don't have a module-level copyright docstring. That might need to be updated too.

[ricardoV94]

I don't know much about license so I'll tag @OriolAbril and @lucianopaz. Our setup here is likely different than pymc

[OriolAbril]

Do these need to be updated to 2026?

If they have 2024-present then updating to 2026-present would mean* we are no longer claiming the copyright for the 2024-2026 window so this particular update should not be done.

*: there is also the license itself and the git history so it wouldn't be as hardcore and worrying, the apache license file header is only recommended after all.

Regarding the apache header addition (with or without pre-commit) I am not completely sure what would be the best way to proceed. For ArviZ we are planning to add it without the year part in the copyright notice, maybe we could do this here too. Otherwise I guess it would have to be Copyright max(2022, year_of_creation) - present The PyMC Developers

[mbaldourw]

Thank you for clarifying!
So it sounds like nothing is strictly needed/urgent to be done here, since the apache header is only recommended not required.

[jessegrabowski]

If the header is only recommended, what do we think about removing it? It's an eyesore.