linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] [1/2many] - FInd the maintainer(s) for a patch

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Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708132351320.29609@enigma.security.iitk.ac.in>
Date:	Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:02:49 +0530 (IST)
From:	Satyam Sharma <satyam@...radead.org>
To:	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>
cc:	Mariusz Kozlowski <m.kozlowski@...land.pl>,
	Joe Perches <joe@...ches.com>, akpm@...ux-foundation.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, torvalds@...ux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [1/2many] - FInd the maintainer(s) for a patch -
 scripts/get_maintainer.pl

On Mon, 13 Aug 2007, Arjan van de Ven wrote:

> 
> On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 19:33 +0200, Mariusz Kozlowski wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > 	I don't recall discusion about this so here are my 3 cents:
> > 
> > 	I like the idea. 
> 
> I don't actually. It shows a central MAINTAINERS file is the wrong
> approach; just that 500+ patches to the same file were needed shows
> that. 
> 
> 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.

I second this thought (keeping MAINTAINERS info closer to code than in
a central kernel-global location), but have a differing opinion about the
implementation. Having MAINTAINERS-style annotations in all source files
sounds needlessly redundant. Worse still, I expect people will avoid adding
these annotations to all source files precisely for this reason, thus
someone editing drivers/xxx/foo.c would have no idea that the maintainer
info for this file is actually in drivers/xxx/bar.c.

Better solution is to have multiple MAINTAINERS files distributed in the
kernel tree, IMHO -- say a drivers/net/MAINTAINERS for maintainer info on
all various net drivers, drivers/kvm/MAINTAINERS for KVM maintainer info,
fs/ext3/MAINTAINERS for ext3 maintainers, fs/MAINTAINERS for generic VFS
maintainers info, so on and so forth. Of course, these individual
MAINTAINERS files could still have the newly-introduced "F:" fields as
well (drivers/net/MAINTAINERS would clearly require it, f.e.) ...

Satyam
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