Re: MODULE_MAINTAINER

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>]

On Thu, Apr 26, 2007 at 12:41:41PM +0200, Rene Herman wrote:
> On 04/26/2007 03:18 AM, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:32:36 +0200 Rene Herman <rene.herman@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> Provide MODULE_MAINTAINER() as a convenient place to stick a name and
>>> email address both for drivers having multiple (current and
>>> non-current) authors and for when someone who wants to maintain a
>>> driver isn't so much an author.
>
> [ snip ]
>
>> I'm not sure we want to do this - that's what ./MAINTAINERS is for and we
>> end up having to maintain the same info in two places.
>
> joe@user:~$ less ./MAINTAINERS
> ./MAINTAINERS: No such file or directory
>
> MAINTAINERS is a developers thing, not users, yet a maintainer is someone 
> who other than by developers wants to be contacted by users of a particular 
> driver. Right now, a module exports a set of name and email addresses 
> through the MODULE_AUTHOR tag but given multiple current and non-current 
> authors, completely or largely orphaned drivers (I have a lot of junk PC 
> hardware so I come across those relatively often) and people who might be 
> interested in taking care of a driver but who do not consider themselves an 
> author for (upto now) having done a s/, struct pt_regs// on it, that tag 
> only confuses the issue of whom to contact.
>
> And it in fact even does so when Joe does know about a MAINTAINERS file and 
> does happen to have a kernel source tree lying around somewhere. With one 
> set of addresses displayed prominently inside the sourcecode of the very 
> driver and another one of in a MAINTAINERS file, the first one wins. Joe 
> would have to be very new to Linux to trust something in the tree that's 
> not actually compiled over something that is.
>
> As the first response in this thread Cristoph Hellwig stated that 
> MODULE_AUTHOR serves no purpose other than what MODULE_MAINTAINER would be 
> serving. Others agreed and Adrian Bunk suggested deleting MODULE_AUTHOR 
> outright.
>
> That would actually also serve my purposes; if there's no MODULE_AUTHOR 
> confusing the issue, I don't so much need a MODULE_MAINTAINER to fix it 
> again. I believe having "modinfo" (optionally!) display a contact address 
> for a driver might be a user advantage, but with all the wrong addresses 
> gone, I don't really care deeply; MODULE_AUTHOR doesn't serve the purpose 
> today and with it gone the user at least knows he needs to look elsewhere. 
> MODULE_AUTHOR is also a credits issue but the information can be 
> transferred to copyright headers. It would obviously also fix any possible 
> maintenance issues.
>
> Alan Cox believes that having author information embedded in the module 
> serves a legal purpose though and objects to removal.
>...

Let me try to summarize the points:
- you think MODULE_AUTHOR without MODULE_MAINTAINER confuses users
- Alan wants MODULE_AUTHOR to stay for easing showing authorship of code
  to people
- I (and others) think MODULE_MAINTAINER wouldn't make sense

Is there any good solution for this?
E.g. modinfo could be changed to no longer defaulting to show the author?

> Rene.

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed