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

[Ben Dooks <ben-linux@fluff.org>]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 10:12:39AM +0200, Uwe Kleine-K?nig wrote:
> 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.

I was thinking of at least making MAINTAINERS per-subsystem, it is a
large file and would be easier for the people submitting patcehs to
avoid having to touch a common 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)

I think that is also a good idea.
  
> If you want to do that with an externally maintained source thats OK for
> me, too, provided it eases patch submission.
> 
> Best regards
> Uwe
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-- 
Ben (ben@fluff.org, http://www.fluff.org/)

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