Re: MAINTAINERS spring-cleaning

[Markus Armbruster <armbru@redhat.com>]

Peter Maydell <peter.maydell@linaro.org> writes:

> I just did some analysis of our MAINTAINERS file with the aid of a
> local copy of the public-inbox archive of qemu-devel, and (unless my
> scripting is broken ;-)) of the 258 emails listed in MAINTAINERS,
> 50 have not sent an email to qemu-devel in the last three years.
>
> Some of that will be things like "the address somebody uses to send
> to the list is not quite the same as the one they have listed", so
> it will need some manual checking, but I think this shows we could
> use a bit of spring-cleaning of the file to remove stale entries.
>
> I propose to send some (not cc'd the list) emails to these people,
> asking (politely!) if they're still interested in being in the
> MAINTAINERS file, and treating "email bounces", "no" and "no reply
> within a month" as "I'm no longer interested in being cc'd on patches".
> Then we can update the file accordingly.
>
> (This was prompted by a series I sent out earlier today getting
> a load of "address unknown" bounce-mails from a corporate server;
> that's not a particularly rare thing to happen IME. And I also
> have developed a habit of manually curating cc lists to drop
> people I suspect of not actually being involved any more...)

Yes, please!

We talked about the issue of stale MAINTAINERS entries before, mostly
when e-mail bounces get sufficiently annoying for somebody to submit or
ask for a MAINTAINERS correction, but as far as I know it always stopped
at talk.

Ignored e-mail is arguably worse than bouncing e-mail.  50 entries out
of 258 is a lot.

If the cleaning you propose works, we should consider repeating it
regularly, to avoid backsliding.  Annually?