Re: [PATCH RESEND v4] MAINTAINERS: fix lots of alphabetic ordering

[Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>]

On Wed, 2017-07-19 at 17:08 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I can easily just look at the reject and fix it, but I don't really
> want to. Why? Because I hate the MAINTAINERS file.
> 
> It's the most painful file for merging too, because everybody touches
> it - kind of like the old "one single Kconfig file" was back in the
> bad old days.

> For example, just during this merge window:
> 
>     $ git rev-list --count --no-merges v4.12.. MAINTAINERS
>     112
> 
> and while most of them obviously didn't cause any conflicts (there
> were four this cycle), it's still my least favourite "stupid work".
> That file pretty consistently gets 100+ changes to it:
> 
>   v4.1: 87
>   v4.2: 109
>   v4.3: 94
>   v4.4: 91
>   v4.5: 118
>   v4.6: 98
>   v4.7: 112
>   v4.8: 121
>   v4.9: 128
>   v4.10: 135
>   v4.11: 78
>   v4.12: 127
> 
> So I'm wondering if
> 
>  (a) we could add a script to do the alphabetical ordering properly.
> 
>  (b) we could split this thing up some sane way.
> 
> Anybody got any ideas?
> 
> I'm throwing out _one_ idea: split it up by the main F: line, so that
> maintainership information ends up being hierarchical like the Kconfig
> files.  Teach "get_maintainer.pl" to just do "find . -name
> MAINTAINERS" instead?

Just for ease of manipulation and not breaking the script much,
I'd suggest just having a MAINTAINERS directory and stuffing
each of the sections into separate files.

The script would only need to add $ cat MAINTAINERS/* as input.