I work on a product whose user interface in one place says something like “Copyright 2004-2025”. The second year there is generated from __DATE__, that way nobody has to do anything to keep it up to date.
I mean, you could do that, it's sort-of a lie though, maybe something better would be using the date of the most recent commit, which would be both more accurate, as far as authorship goes, and actually deterministic..
Pipe something like this into your build system:
date --date "$(git log HEAD --author-date-order --pretty=format:"%ad" --date=iso | head -n1)" +"%Y"
I work on a product whose user interface in one place says something like “Copyright 2004-2025”. The second year there is generated from __DATE__, that way nobody has to do anything to keep it up to date.