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. Magento is Isildur and 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.