Related work to MAINTAINERS truth and fiction

Related work to MAINTAINERS truth and fiction

[Lukas Bulwahn]

Hi Jonathan,

thanks for your interesting article, MAINTAINERS truth and fiction,
https://lwn.net/Articles/842415/.

Just some pointers to related work:

Pia Eichinger has done some related analysis and work in this area as
part of her bachelor's thesis on Maintainers Expectations vs.
Maintainers Reality: An Analysis of Organisational and Maintenance
Structure of the Linux Kernel. Simply quoting her conclusion:

"We showed that around 20% of all patches were theoretically wrongly
integrated when strictly analysing MAINTAINERS. The reality of
integration and maintenance structure is more complicated than that,
which we also explored. Furthermore, we identified 12 major subsystems
of the Linux kernel. This is very helpful for an overview of the
organisational structure, realistic grouping of subsystems and further
Linux kernel topology discussions."

Announcement and thesis here:
https://lists.elisa.tech/g/devel/message/1269
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12ta2YxgEzEfrIcmWid8kwIyVEywbUjbA/view?usp=sharing

As you might have noticed as well, ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl
--self-test provides a few checks and warnings on the MAINTAINERS
file. For a few months by now, I have been following up on new
warnings appearing with ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl
--self-test=patterns, excluding Documentation/devicetree/bindings/, as
Mauro takes care of those often before my patches usually get
accepted.

In the past, I also did an analysis of what is only in THE REST, see
some discussion here:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/alpine.DEB.2.21.2003090702440.3325@felia/

After a few manual clean-up attempts for files in include, I concluded
that this activity needs to be at least semi-automatically done with
some scripted heuristics and then sanity-checked by experts. I have
not made any progress beyond that, though; it is certainly a good task
for an interested student or mentee.

Thanks again for your interesting article.


Best regards,

Lukas

Re: Related work to MAINTAINERS truth and fiction

[Jonathan Corbet]

On Fri, 15 Jan 2021 07:57:51 +0100
Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com> wrote:

> Pia Eichinger has done some related analysis and work in this area as
> part of her bachelor's thesis on Maintainers Expectations vs.
> Maintainers Reality: An Analysis of Organisational and Maintenance
> Structure of the Linux Kernel. Simply quoting her conclusion:
> 
> "We showed that around 20% of all patches were theoretically wrongly
> integrated when strictly analysing MAINTAINERS. The reality of
> integration and maintenance structure is more complicated than that,
> which we also explored. Furthermore, we identified 12 major subsystems
> of the Linux kernel. This is very helpful for an overview of the
> organisational structure, realistic grouping of subsystems and further
> Linux kernel topology discussions."
> 
> Announcement and thesis here:
> https://lists.elisa.tech/g/devel/message/1269
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/12ta2YxgEzEfrIcmWid8kwIyVEywbUjbA/view?usp=sharing

Interesting, I was completely unaware of this work.  I blame Wolfgang, who
should have pointed it out to me :)

Thanks,

jon

Re: [EXT] Re: Related work to MAINTAINERS truth and fiction

[Wolfgang Mauerer]

Am 15/01/2021 um 17:52 schrieb Jonathan Corbet:
> On Fri, 15 Jan 2021 07:57:51 +0100
> Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Pia Eichinger has done some related analysis and work in this area as
>> part of her bachelor's thesis on Maintainers Expectations vs.
>> Maintainers Reality: An Analysis of Organisational and Maintenance
>> Structure of the Linux Kernel. Simply quoting her conclusion:
>>
>> "We showed that around 20% of all patches were theoretically wrongly
>> integrated when strictly analysing MAINTAINERS. The reality of
>> integration and maintenance structure is more complicated than that,
>> which we also explored. Furthermore, we identified 12 major subsystems
>> of the Linux kernel. This is very helpful for an overview of the
>> organisational structure, realistic grouping of subsystems and further
>> Linux kernel topology discussions."
>>
>> Announcement and thesis here:
>> https://lists.elisa.tech/g/devel/message/1269
>> https://drive.google.com/file/d/12ta2YxgEzEfrIcmWid8kwIyVEywbUjbA/view?usp=sharing
> 
> Interesting, I was completely unaware of this work.  I blame Wolfgang, who
> should have pointed it out to me :)

well, I do accept .8 of the blame. For the remaining .2, I have to
say that with a little time travel in forward direction (especially
since we're not doing isochronous spatial travel any more!), you could
have easily seen Pia's presentation at LCA in a week or so :)

Actually, I was planning on pitching the results to you for lwn; if you
find there are some aspects left in the work that you have not covered
yet, and that's interesting for the community, we'd of course be happy
to contribute a short piece. Pia will post a repo link for the analysis
soon.

Thanks, Wolfgang


> 
> Thanks,
> 
> jon
>