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

Jeff Garzik
2002-01-30T09:45:16Z

On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 09:19:12AM +0000, Russell King wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 04:44:12PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > I have to admit that personally I've always found the MAINTAINERS file
> > more of an irritation than anything else. The first place _I_ tend to look
> > personally is actually in the source files themselves (although that may
> > be a false statistic - the kind of people I tend to have to look up aren't
> > the main maintainers at all, but more single driver people etc).
> >
> > It might not be a bad idea to just make that "mention maintainer at the
> > top of the file" the common case.
>
> There's one problem with that though - if someone maintains many files,
> and his email address changes, you end up with a large patch changing all
> those email addresses in every file.
>
> IMHO its far better to have someone's name at the top of each file, and
> put the email addresses in the MAINTAINERS file.

Also FWIW I go to MAINTAINERS file first, when I construct the CC line
for patches sent to Linus. Poking around the source is annoying and not
terribly scalable in my experience.

Jeff