Re: [PATCH trival/tree-wide] Change Ryan Mallon's email address across the kernel

[Paul Mundt <lethal@linux-sh.org>]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 01:31:54PM +1000, Ryan Mallon wrote:
> On 10/06/11 13:24, Joe Perches wrote:
> >On Fri, 2011-06-10 at 13:13 +1000, Ryan Mallon wrote:
> >>On 10/06/11 13:11, Joe Perches wrote:
> >>>On Fri, 2011-06-10 at 13:05 +1000, Ryan Mallon wrote:
> >>>>On 10/06/11 12:55, Paul Mundt wrote:
> >>>>>On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 09:12:50AM +1000, Ryan Mallon wrote:
> >>>>>>I no longer work at Bluewater Systems. Update my email address 
> >>>>>>accordingly.
> >>>>>Is this sort of churn really necessary?
> >>>get_maintainer uses the name and address in the first seen
> >>>commit matching on the full name where possible.
> >>Okay, what is the correct fix then so that people get the right email
> >>address for me?
> >I believe updating the MAINTAINERS file and
> >authoring and committing patches that take
> >your email address out of files works well.
> 
> If I strip my email address, but leave my name and copyright in the 
> files the patch will have the same amount of churn right?
> 
Not necessarily. You can leave the copyright bits intact but simply
update (or strip out) the address from the MODULE_AUTHOR part so people
still get the proper data from modinfo and so on. There are many people
with non-working email addresses in copyright statements tree-wide, so
there's certainly a precedent for it. It's also a motivator for not
bothering with inlining the email address in the future, unless it's to
avoid ambiguity (ie, a work done on behalf of an employer, who retains
all rights).

If there are files that you have authored but get_maintainers is
groveling the commits and using your old address, you can preempt this by
simply adding a MAINTAINERS entry with the appropriate file pattern, too.