linux-kernel - Re: RFHelp: Splitting MAINTAINERS into maintainers/* and Makefile/Kconfig support

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Message-Id: <1187353841.822.60.camel@localhost>
Date:	Fri, 17 Aug 2007 05:30:41 -0700
From:	Joe Perches <joe@...ches.com>
To:	Chris Snook <csnook@...hat.com>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: RFHelp:  Splitting MAINTAINERS into maintainers/*
	and	Makefile/Kconfig support

On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 02:25 -0400, Chris Snook wrote:
> The whole point of MAINTAINERS is to have one central repository for this 
> information, instead of scattering it throughout the various source files.  If 
> that file is getting too unwieldy (and I don't think it is) then I could 
> understand splitting it up hierarchically, for example having a 
> drivers/net/MAINTAINERS that listed the info for all the net drivers.

The individual MAINTAINERS files eliminates what Linus
described as their "hotness".
No shared updates by multiple parties.

> What you're suggesting is a less efficient equivalent to putting the info 
> directly into the source files.

I believe that wrong.

Maintainer patterns frequently look like:

F:	arch/i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq/
F:	drivers/cpufreq/
F:	include/linux/cpufreq.h

If in source, this would currently require 21 + 12 + 1 
modifications instead of 1.

> If that approach was enough to make people 
> happy, we wouldn't have MAINTAINERS to begin with.

I think the insertion of maintainers into source
itself is wrong.  It's freeform, error prone and
requires significant modifications to source files
as maintainers come and go.

> Perhaps with a little automation it could be revived,

Which is the help I'm looking for.

Can someone please help here on ideas or implementation
adding a makefile target for MAINTAINERS from files
in a specific subdirectory?

> though I think that adding a path pattern 
> removes the need, while keeping it easier to parse by scripts.
> I appreciate the effort to make MAINTAINERS more useful,
> but please don't add  another 600 files to the tree.

In the distributed form, you'll still end up with
~400 new files spread all over the tree.

Either way, you'll have hundreds of files.

$ grep "^F:" MAINTAINERS |  sed -e "s/[A-Za-z0-9\_\*\.\-]*$//" | sort |
uniq | wc -l
415

Centralized as maintainers/* or distributed as ../../../Maintainers

Pick one, I don't much care, but I'm still looking for
Makefile/KConfig help reassembling it into a single
MAINTAINERS block similar to the current form.

Help?

cheers, Joe

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