Re: A modest proposal -- We need a patch penguin

David Lang
2002-01-31T01:44:18Z

Eric posted a proposal to split the maintainers info across all
directories/files sometime last year and got shouted down to the point of
not mentioning it anymore (which as we know takes quite a bit for him :-)

does someone want to dig up that proposal and recirculate it rather then
starting from scratch again?

David Lang

On Thu, 31 Jan 2002, Stuart Young wrote:

> Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 12:16:29 +1100
> From: Stuart Young <sgy@amc.com.au>
> To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
> Cc: Daniel Egger <degger@fhm.edu>, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
> Subject: Re: A modest proposal -- We need a patch penguin
>
> At 02:13 PM 30/01/02 +0100, Daniel Egger wrote:
> >Am Mit, 2002-01-30 um 00.50 schrieb Linus Torvalds:
> >
> > > Or look at USB: I get the USB patches from Greg, and he gets them from
> > > various different people. Johannes Erdfelt is the maintainer for uhci.c,
> > > and he sends them to Greg, not to me.
> >
> >What about creating a small document that states who's the correct
> >recipient for a subsystem? This would prevent dotzends of questions
> >like "Where do I send my patches?" and turn them into a RTFF.
>
> A reworking of MAINTAINERS could be beneficial and help achieve this.
>
> Linus mentioned that he prefers to look at the code to see who to talk to.
> Others have mentioned this may be nice, but makes it hard to get some sort
> of overall view, plus since programmers can be inconsistent in stuff like
> this, it may not always happen. How about we turn the problem upside down,
> and figure out how to get the code easily referenced in MAINTAINERS?
>
> What I'm thinking is that we could add (multiple?) lines into MAINTAINERS
> that specify the actual FILES in the kernel (in reference to linux/) that
> someone works on or maintains. We don't have to list every file (wildcards,
> regex's, etc, can work too), plus you can list the maintainers of various
> areas of the code (such as generic maintainers of all the files under a
> part of the kernel file tree) by just listing what directories they
> control. Something so that it's dead simple to extract who maintains this file.
>
> Here's a possible example:
>
> Say I'm looking at the SiS/Trident Audio Driver, and I have a patch I want
> to send to a maintainer. The file I'm working on is:
>
> linux/drivers/sound/trident.*
>
> If I could easily search MAINTAINERS for who maintains this file, I'm made.
> If I can't find that, I start trimming the search (to say
> linux/drivers/sound/, which would be the sound maintainer).
>
> If we say add an F: field to maintainers (at the end of the maintainers
> record), you can easily do things like...
>
> grep -B 10 "F: linux/drivers/sound/trident" /usr/src/linux/MAINTAINERS
>
> ...and get some sort of results (-B is "before context, which displays
> lines before the found line, and is quite useful in this sort of situation)
> that help. This is just a quick and dirty example, and I'm sure someone
> could easily write a small script that could parse the output better, do
> things like automatically cut the search back till it finds a match, etc.
>
> This could also be used to figure out a tree of who does what, which is
> probably not a bad idea.
>
> Just an idea of course. *grin*
>
>
> Stuart Young - sgy@amc.com.au
> (aka Cefiar) - cefiar1@optushome.com.au
>
> [All opinions expressed in the above message are my]
> [own and not necessarily the views of my employer..]
>
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