Re: [RFC] automatic CC generation for patch submission

[Dan Aloni <da-x@monatomic.org>]

On Sat, Jun 30, 2007 at 02:54:25AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Jun 2007 19:51:53 -0700 "Kok, Auke" <auke-jan.h.kok@intel.com> wrote:
> 
> > > Some extensions to the popular E-Mail clients might be needed 
> > > here. Also, a bot reading LKML would automatically send links 
> > > about posted patches to the other mailing lists whenever 
> > > someone forgets to add a CC.
> > > 
> > > Any comments?
> > 
> > an easier way to implement this is to add an extra field in the MAINTAINERS 
> > file, something like below. All the contact info would stay the same, closely 
> > where applicable and it would allow you to also specify specific files as well.
> 
> We already have that information in git.  Parse the git changelogs of the
> affected files, find out who works on them.

I think it's quite complex to make a reliable inference of maintainership 
information from git. Given a set of historical modifiers of a file, 
would you take the most common commiter(s), or the most common 
_recent_ commiter(s), or what? It's a bit fuzzy.
 
Moreover, it is slow in comparison and assumes the availability of 
local .git db, which wouldn't be the case for some porition of patch 
submitters.

> Not that it'll help much, given the amnount of stuff which gets
> mysteriously ignored even when the correct people are cc'ed...

Hopefully it gets ignored if it is quite low in priority. In that
case the CC is a NOP but might still be good for archiving purposes.

> (For extra giggles we could parse emailed oops and bug reports and add the
> appropriate cc's there too.  Harder.)

BTS was discussed to death already, let's not delve into that...

-- 
Dan Aloni
XIV LTD, http://www.xivstorage.com
da-x (at) monatomic.org, dan (at) xiv.co.il