Re: [PATCH] get_maintainer.pl: append reason for cc to the name by default

Alan Cox
2010-09-10T11:24:06Z

> > One possible improvement that get_maintainers could
> > add is to [optionally] CC the author of the first
> > commit when there's no listed maintainer.
>
> That might be a nice option (though it will still give false positives).
> Something based on percentage of the driver written rather than log
> entry counts might also be interesting.

Within a time limit yes.

I'd guess a heuristic along the lines of

original committer && has committed in the past 6 months

might work rather well - and you could probably walk up the list of
signed-off-by this way with the same rule and take a fair shot at a
maintainer.

Trouble is for a lot of other stuff beyond that you need to hit the
person whose signoff is on most of the submits to that file/subtree in the
past six months but not count wide cross tree commits

That gets a bit harder to compute.

Seems like there is a social sciences or systems research project here
to do some graph theory and modelling into "who really maintains the Linux
kernel"

Alan