Short story

Gravity Department will publish a proper diff (with copyright changes negated) until Magento 1.x is unsupported:

Magento Release Diffs on GitHub

Long story

Magento changes their copyright statement every year, which changes all files. This creates unusable diffs with +10,000 insignificant changes obscuring ~200 important changes.

Why is that?

1. Magento’s lawyers must increment the copyright year, or Mortal Kombat threatens to consume Earth.
2. Magento (the corporation) was renamed a lot (Varien, X.commerce, Magento).
3. Magento won’t publish a copyright-only release every January 1.
4. Magento won’t publish a usable diff. I don’t know why.

Consequently, every developer has to negate those changes and generate a legitate diff to understand the release’s impact. We’ve wasted thousands of hours collectively doing this.

I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago when the strength of Men failed

2010

The tweet is lost, but this captures the mood:

Note — Magento is Isildur. I’m Elrond.

2011

The stable ➞ stable diff includes every file in @magento because the copyright year changed http://t.co/IF7rHSO

Hence the diff is useless.

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) September 2, 2011

2012

The @Magento upgrade despair:

DIFF includes all files because http://t.co/zBZcXqUM

Someone renamed htmlEscape() to escapeHtml(). #facepalm

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) May 3, 2012

2013

Seriously @magento?

Third year in a row of this copyright crap: http://t.co/HVaNWifSsw

.diff = 6,930 changed files. Can’t work with that.

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) September 25, 2013

2014

And the ever-present “copyright year incrementation explodes the diff’s usefulness” strikes again.

The fix: https://t.co/0eoIHv4u4z

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) May 18, 2014

Just diffed Magento 1.9.0.1 ➔ 1.9.1.0 — now I know why @piotrekkaminski was apologizing for copyright changes again. pic.twitter.com/lHLnK6N0HN

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) December 14, 2014

2015

Yikes, Magento 1.9.2.0.

4,993 changed files
180,055 additions
19,571 deletions

Roughly by folder:
50% Zend
30% functional tests
20% app

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) July 8, 2015

2016

Magento 1.9.2.2 – 1.9.2.3

9142 files changed

After stripping out copyright jerking:
~380 files changed

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) January 24, 2016

2017

Eagerly awaiting @Falkowski’s annual copyright date rant.

— Alan Storm (@alanstorm) January 7, 2017

When you’re not mad, just disappointed nobody could stop it happening again (x7).

9219 files changed, 97% copyright, 3% real diffs to find pic.twitter.com/ZZfRmwdc2D

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) February 7, 2017

2018

Raise a glass to my 9th year pointing out @magento changing copyright in every file once a year costs thousands of non-productive hours.

The release diff has 9251 changes like this. Everyone has to individually decipher what actually changed. pic.twitter.com/XDS69fJsfF

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) February 28, 2018

It’s finally over (Magento 2 only)

I'd like to think eight years of shadow boxing helped this PR land the punch. https://t.co/BF0QRVF0lq

— Brendan Falkowski (@Falkowski) March 31, 2017

Less than a year ago, a random pull request instantly nullified the legal obligations. Nobody knows how it happened.

I thought that was the end, but the first Magento 1 release of 2018 incremented the copyright year again. So I guess it’s just impossible.

Being a Magento developer is swallowing swords forever. You can’t have enough persistence.