Re: rfc: rewrite commit subject line for subsystem maintainer preference tool

[Florian Mickler <florian@mickler.org>]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2010 06:51:17 -0800
Joe Perches <joe@perches.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 2010-11-16 at 10:49 +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 11:52:53AM -0800, Joe Perches wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 19:34 +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> > > > It appears your scripts are already hooked into get_maintainers.pl which
> > > > would seem the obvious place to do this?  Sadly I don't do perl, though
> > > > it looks like you're doing pretty much all the work on that anyway.
> > > Sadly, no it's not the right place.
> > To query MAINTAINERS?  I'd assume that's where you'd want to put that
> > stuff?
> 
> I trimmed cc's and added Andrew Morton and Florian Mickler.
> First thread link for them: http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/11/15/262
> 
> I use get_maintainer to find email addresses with
> "git send-email --cc-cmd=" but sure it could be extended
> to find some other new information in the MAINTAINERS file.
> 
> Anyway, I think that get_maintainers isn't the proper tool
> to rewrite commit subject lines, though it could certainly
> do the lookup of a key in the MAINTAINERS file.
> 
> Maybe add a new MAINTAINERS section line something like:
> 	"C:	CommitSubjectGrammarStyle"
> where CommitSubjectGrammarStyle is something more
> information rich than "style 1", "style 2".
> 
> Perhaps you'll propose a grammar to convert path to header
> and go through and add these "C:" style entries to the
> sections you maintain.
> 
> Also, what would you expect the output to be when a single
> patch modified files from 2 subsystems that use different
> styles?
> 
> cheers, Joe
> 

My first reaction to this is, it's silly. Certainly a
subsystem-maintainer is capable of hacking something together that
suits his needs or may just use a good editor to get the job done.
After all, he might want to edit the commit message anyway. Also he has
to have his act together for all non-conforming submitters anyway,
because shurely, telling people to re-edit their patches subject line
is not what one would consider "welcoming to newbies",  or whatever it
is kernel subsystem maintainers have to be nowadays *g*... 

On second thought, if that facility existed, i think nobody would mind
it either. So, why not. I don't see a way to specify what to do with
cross-subsystem patches though. 

(MAINTAINERS seems to be the logical place to put this
information.)

Regards,
Flo