Re: [RFC] CCing MAINTAINERS on patches by default?

[Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>]

Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell <at> citrix.com> writes:
> On Tue, 2013-03-12 at 20:35 +0000, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 05:07:42PM +0000, Tim Deegan wrote:
> > > At 17:00 +0000 on 12 Mar (1363107618), Ian Campbell wrote:
> > > > With the numbers of patches flying around it can be a bit hard for a
> > > > maintainer to spot patches which (s)he is expected to comment on / deal
> > > > with, especially now that we have a larger number of maintainers of
> > > > varying subsystems etc.
> > > > 
> > > > I think it might be time to start asking patch submitters to CC the
> > > > maintainers of the code they are touching, based on the MAINTAINERS
> > > > file.
> > > > 
> > > > If people (specifically maintainers) agree with this change then we can
> > > > start by updating the "Submitting Patches" docs on the wiki etc and
> > > > gently start requesting submitters to add the CCs.
> > > 
> > > Fine by me; I usually work from my xen-devel inbox but I don't object to
> > > being Cc'd directly.
> > > 
> > > Can we provide git/hg runes to add Cc:s automatically?
> > 
> > That would be neat. Linux uses scripts/get_maintainers.pl to fetch from
> > the MAINTAINERS file the names of folks. That could be imported in?
> 
> Linux's get_maintainers.pl is way too aggressive about who it defaults
> to CCing (basically the world and his dog). How about we go with asking
> for manual CCs for now and we can revisit tooling (e.g. tweaking the
> get_maintainer's defaults) once we've got a feel for what works for us.

linux's get_maintainers by default no longer cc's the world.

It looks to see if a file has a maintainer, and if it does, it lists
only that person (and any other higher-level by path maintainer).

If a file does not have a maintainer, it tries to use git or hg
history sign-offs.

These behaviours can be controlled by adding command line options.

--git             (always use git history <default:n>)
--git-fallback    (use git history when there's no maintainer <default:y>)

So using get_maintainer --nogit --nogit-fallback might do what you want.