Re: [RFC] List of maintainers (draft #3)

["Uwe Kleine-König" <ukleinek@strlen.de>]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2002 at 12:54:56PM -0200, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> After recent discussion on Linux development practices I think it may be
> worthy to have list of lk maintainers. Unlike one included into kernel
> source, this document is meant to be monthly (weekly?) mailed to lkml
> and to be modified whenever new victim wishes to be listed in it
> or someone can no longer devote his time to maintainer work.
I don't see an advantage of a regular mail compared to a file in the
tree, but obviously YMMV.

But another thing really bothers me:  I think there should not be more
than one place I have to look up manually for maintainers.  Currently I
have ~100 easy patches pending and the most time consuming part of
finishing these is looking up the right address to send to send them to.
Currently I already have to check the modified files for a maintainer
entry, MAINTAINERS and the history of the files.

IMHO this could be automated with some effort.  I currently imagine:
 - a MAINTAINERS maintainer?!
 - a certain format to specify a maintainer of a single file in that
   file (e.g. in a specially marked comment) to prevent overloading
   MAINTAINERS
 - maybe a per-directory .maintainers file.
 - add a field to each entry in MAINTAINERS specifying a regular
   expression or shell wildcard of the corresponding files and
   directories.
 - a script that takes a patch and extracts the addresses from the above
   sources (and optionally calls git send-email)
 
If you want to do that with an externally maintained source thats OK for
me, too, provided it eases patch submission.

Best regards
Uwe