My company (let's call them Acme Technology) has a library of approximately one thousand source files that originally came from its Acme Labs research group, incubated in a development group for a couple years, and has more recently been provided
to a handful of customers under non-disclosure. Acme is getting ready
to release perhaps 75% of
the code
to the open source community.
The other 25% would be released later, but for now, is either not ready for customer use or contains code related
to future innovations they need
to keep out of
the hands of competitors.
The code is presently formatted with #ifdefs that permit
the same code base
to work with
the pre-production platforms that will be available
to university researchers and a much wider range of commercial customers once it goes
to open source, while at
the same time being available for experimentation and prototyping and forward compatibility testing with
the future platform. Keeping a single code base is considered essential for
the economics (and sanity) of my group who would have a tough time maintaining two copies in parallel.
Files in our current base look something like this:
> // Copyright 2012 (C) Acme Technology, All Rights Reserved.
> // Very large, often varied and restrictive copyright license in English and French,
> // sometimes also embedded in make files and shell scripts with varied
> // comment styles.
>
>
> ... Usual header stuff...
>
> void initTechnologyLibrary() {
> nuiInterface(on);
> #ifdef UNDER_RESEARCH
> holographicVisualization(on);
> #endif
> }
And we would like
to convert them
to something like:
> // GPL Copyright (C) Acme Technology Labs 2012, Some rights reserved.
> // Acme appreciates your interest in its technology, please contact
[email protected]
> // for technical support, and www.acme.com/emergingTech for updates and RSS feed.
>
> ... Usual header stuff...
>
> void initTechnologyLibrary() {
> nuiInterface(on);
> }
Is there a tool, parse library, or popular script that can replace
the copyright and strip out not just #ifdefs, but variations like #if defined(UNDER_RESEARCH), etc.?
The code is presently in Git and would likely be hosted somewhere that uses Git. Would there be a way
to safely link repositories together so we can efficiently reintegrate our improvements with
the open source versions? Advice about other pitfalls is welcome.
