Re: [Ksummit-2013-discuss] KS Topic request: Handling the Stable kernel, let's dump the cc: stable tag

Joe Perches
2013-07-15T21:34:06Z

On Mon, 2013-07-15 at 17:21 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> How many maintainers are really just volunteers?

No idea. Here's a data point.

$ git grep "^S:" MAINTAINERS|sed -r 's/\s+/ /g'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn
818 MAINTAINERS:S: Maintained
248 MAINTAINERS:S: Supported
49 MAINTAINERS:S: Odd Fixes
32 MAINTAINERS:S: Orphan
10 MAINTAINERS:S: Odd fixes
2 MAINTAINERS:S: Unmaintained
1 MAINTAINERS:S: Orphan / Obsolete
1 MAINTAINERS:S: Odd Fixes (e.g., new signatures)
1 MAINTAINERS:S: Obsolete
1 MAINTAINERS:S: Maintained for 2.6.
1 MAINTAINERS:S: Maintained:
1 MAINTAINERS:S: Buried alive in reporters

I will note that most MAINTAINER section entries
don't actually have people actively shepherding
patches. There's no aging out of inactive entries.

> And of those, how many have critical parts of the kernel
> that distros rely on.

No idea. I'd guess most distributions don't go
out of their way to hire folk when "good enough"
seems to be working.

> If they do, then one would think that a distro
> would hire them.