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

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Date:	Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:51:36 +0200
From:	Rene Herman <rene.herman@...il.com>
To:	Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>
CC:	Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@....uio.no>,
	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 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.

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