Glenn Morris wrote: > can it [update-copyright] stop refilling copyright notices?
That's a property of Gnulib's build-aux/update-copyright script. I suspect that part of the code dates back to when we had long lists of individual years, like this: # Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc. such that it made sense to refill when adding yet another year. Now, when we typically just substitute 2013 for 2012 there's less motivation for refilling. I'll CC: this to bug-gnulib, where the maintainer of build-aux/update-copyright hangs out, to see if he has some comments. I expect we can add another option or environ variable or something.
