Re: MODULE_MAINTAINER

Rene Herman
2007-04-26T10:44:18Z

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.

So, if MODULE_AUTHOR is going to stay I'd like to have MODULE_MAINTAINER to
fix the message it sends. Some of it could be fixed by just deleting the
email addresses from the MODULE_AUTHOR tag but that's probably not a good
solution _either_. Those possible legal purposes are then the only
conceivable use of the tag meaning that it should either be deleted outright
if people don't agree on the legal angle or should retain the address as a
contact point for legal issues/questions if people do.

The purpose I want MODULE_MAINTAINER for would not introduce any significant
maintenance issues. It's not a "whole tree or nothing" thing. I want it for
a few ISA crap drivers that have outlived their authors but list their names
and email addresses in the source and binary through the MODULE_AUTHOR tag;
simply going around deleting MODULE_AUTHOR tags is not something us random
kernelnewbie wannabee driver hackers can do. It's something "the community"
could do but if noone is going to, we don't have a good way to override the
information from MODULE_AUTHOR.

Rene.