Re: [RFC] How to (automatically) find the correct maintainer(s)

[Richard Knutsson <ricknu-0@student.ltu.se>]

Stefan Richter wrote:
> On 15 Jan, Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
>   
>> Stefan Richter wrote:
>>     
>>> On 14 Jan, Richard Knutsson wrote:
>>>       
>>>> (Really liked the idea to have a "Maintainer"-button 
>>>> next to "Help" in *config)
>>>>         
>>> Rhetorical question: What will this button be used for?
>>>       
>> Having "all(tm)" information of something in one place?
>>     
>
> Or, "click here to say 'it does not work'"?
>
> My rhetorical question wasn't about what it is intended for, but what
> people would think it was intended for if it was there.
>
>   
I think it could be practical to have an easy access to whom is 
responsible for a driver and which mailinglist its development is 
addressed to, both for people interested in helping develop the driver 
and those who got an error (or fan-mail :).
>> I think adding the Maintainers-data is more or less a logical next step.
>>
>> It's not always clear from the MAINTAINERS-file who is the right person
>> for what. Especially as it is a rather large text-file with only
>> mediocre search-friendlieness. It's a 3.5 K-lines file!
>>
>> So when you know that you have a problem with drivers X, wouldn't it be
>> great if you could just "go to" the driver in *config and see not only
>> the Help-Text but the Maintainers-Data also.
>>     
>
> Seems more like what you actually want to have there is links to users'
> mailinglists or forums.
>
> When this thread started, it was about assisting authors in submitting
> patches.
>
>   
Yes, this is a bit out of scope, but just realized a simple way to 
implement it if using the CONFIG_FLAG-approach, just "grep" after the 
flag, under which the user hit the "Maintainer"-button, in the 
MAINTAINER-file. Also, I think this solves the handler-problem since an 
entry can have multiple CONFIG_FLAG's stated.

I don't think we should add the maintainer-entries directly in Kconfig, 
as you Stefan stated, because it is for configure the kernel. With the 
above approach, it will just require minor fixes in the "make *config" 
to handle it.