Re: Request for comment -- a better attribution system

Eric S. Raymond
2001-04-21T20:29:38Z

Albert D. Cahalan <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>:
> Eric S. Raymond writes:
>
> > This is a proposal for an attribution metadata system in the Linux
> > kernel sources. The goal of the system is to make it easy for
> > people reading any given piece of code to identify the responsible
> > maintainer. The motivation for this proposal is that the present
> > system, a single top-level MAINTAINERS file, doesn't seem to be
> > scaling well.
>
> It is nice to have a single file for grep. With the proposed
> changes one would sometimes need to grep every file.

The right way to handle that is to have a report generator that does the
grep for you, or if you like simply returns the concatenation of all the
map blocks so you can grep that.

The point of distributing them is so they're close to the work units they
describe, and are thus (a) easy to find, and (b) more likely to stay up to
date.
--
Eric S. Raymond

Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good to be
bought at the price of liberty.
-- Hillaire Belloc