Re: [PATCH] [1/2many] - FInd the maintainer(s) for a patch - scripts/get_maintainer.pl

Rene Herman
2007-08-14T01:55:55Z

On 08/14/2007 03:19 AM, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

> On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 16:37 -0400, Trond Myklebust wrote:
>> On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 10:42 -0700, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

>>> The maintainer info should be in the source file itself! That's the only
>>> reasonable way to keep it updated; now I'm all for having it machine
>>> parsable so that tools can use it, but it still really should be in the
>>> code itself, not in some central file that will always just go out of
>>> data, and will be a huge source of needless patch conflicts.
>>
>> If the problem is to do with people failing to update the MAINTAINERS
>> file, why would moving the same data into 20 or 30 source files
>> motivate them to keep it up to date? As far as I can see, that would
>> just serve to multiply the amount of stale data...
>
> if each .c file has a MODULE_MAINTAINER() tag...
>
> people tend to update .c files a lot better than way off-the-side other
> files.

MODULE_MAINTAINER() was discussed a while ago but embedding information into
the binary has the problem you can't ever change deployed systems, meaning
it lags by design. If a maintainer changes, people would still be using the
information from their old binaries, meaning a replaced maintainer might get
contacted for potentially years still (and the new one not).

(you could avoid that by placing not a name/address in the maintainer tag
but a pointer to somewhere else but at that point this gets to be about
solving something else).

Keeping it in the source alone is fine. C files could just embed their
MAINTAINERS entry as a header:

/*
* P: Maintainer
* M: Mail patches to
* L: Mailing list that is relevant to this area
* W: Web-page with status/info
* T: SCM tree type and location. Type is one of: git, hg, quilt.
* S: Status, one of the following:
*/

And probably adding fields:

* I: Info/Summary (for index files and the like)
* A: Author
* G: License

and such. Yes, while we're at it, we can pick better letters or full word
tags ;-)

Rene.