MAINTAINERS spring-cleaning

MAINTAINERS spring-cleaning

[Peter Maydell]

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...)

thanks
-- PMM

Re: MAINTAINERS spring-cleaning

[Thomas Huth]

On 04/11/2025 18.36, Peter Maydell wrote:
> 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.

+1 from my side - sounds like a good idea!

  Thomas

Re: MAINTAINERS spring-cleaning

[Markus Armbruster]

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?