Re: [RFC] docs: process: Send patches 'To' maintainers and 'Cc' lists

Jakub Kicinski
2023-06-04T18:33:55Z

On Sat, 3 Jun 2023 08:14:47 -0700 James Seo wrote:
> +You should always notify the appropriate subsystem maintainer(s) and list(s)

s/notify/specify as recipients/ ?
notify sounds like an out of band ping, maybe just to me.

> +about any patch to code that they maintain. Identify them by looking through
> +the MAINTAINERS file and the source code revision history, and by using the
> +script scripts/get_maintainer.pl (pass paths to your patches as arguments to
> +scripts/get_maintainer.pl). Send your patch e-mail "To:" those maintainers and
> +"Cc:" those lists.

There's a handful of people who run get_maintainer on the file paths,

./scripts/get_maintainer.pl net/core/dev.c
rather than
./scripts/get_maintainer.pl 0001-my.patch

This leads to ignoring Fixes tags, and authors of fixed commits should
really be CCed.

Since we're touching this paragraph maybe we can massage the wording
a bit:

(pass paths to your patches generated by git format-patch as arguments
to scripts/get_maintainer.pl)

> +If you cannot find a maintainer for the subsystem you are working on, Andrew
> +Morton (akpm@linux-foundation.org) serves as a maintainer of last resort. Also,

Thanks for the patch, btw, we also see To-less patches a couple times
a month on netdev@ :(