Re: MODULE_MAINTAINER

Rene Herman
2007-04-27T21:09:01Z

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On 04/27/2007 12:03 AM, Rene Herman wrote:

> With the point you make about old installed kernel modules having
> outdated information forever you've in fact convinced me that
> MODULE_MAINTAINER is not a good idea.

[ ... ]

> Deleting the email addresses from the MODULE_AUTHOR tag would go some
> ways to fix it; it's then at least clearer that the author is not being
> displayed as a general contact for the driver. It may on the other hand
> want to remain as a legal contact and I only know of "modinfo" as a
> normal way of listing the tags, so even a very minimal solution such as
> having modinfo supress the author tag, or even just any email address in
> it, would be good enough.

Ie, something like the attached minimal patch to modinfo that just supresses
the author= tag from the default output; the information is still available
from modinfo -a.

However. Looking at the MODULE_AUTHOR tags in the tree:

rene@7ixe4:~/src/linux/local$ grep -r MODULE_AUTHOR * | wc -l
2211

more than half of them already don't provide an email address:

rene@7ixe4:~/src/linux/local$ grep -r "MODULE_AUTHOR(.*<.*>.*)" * | wc -l
1088

Alan is one of the people using just MODULE_AUTHOR("Alan Cox") without an
address. Given that the email address is all that I want to supress; how
about just deleting that instead?

I'd prefer that; unlike the name, the adress is information that can get
outdated and moreover, removing the address not only from the modinfo output
but from the source directly means it can't be mistaken for a contact
address there either.

Comments? Objections? If none, I'll start submitting patches removing email
addresses from the MODULE_AUTHOR tags in the tree.

Rene.

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--- module-init-tools-3.3-pre1/modinfo.c.orig 2007-04-04 12:54:19.000000000 +0200
+++ module-init-tools-3.3-pre1/modinfo.c 2007-04-27 22:41:54.000000000 +0200
@@ -167,6 +167,9 @@
for (; info; info = next_string(info, &size)) {
char *eq, *colon;

+ if (strstarts(info, "author="))
+ continue;
+
/* We expect this in parm and parmtype. */
colon = strchr(info, ':');