linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH RESEND v4] MAINTAINERS: fix lots of alphabetic ordering

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Date:   Wed, 19 Jul 2017 17:08:48 -0700
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:     Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@...radead.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH RESEND v4] MAINTAINERS: fix lots of alphabetic ordering

On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 2:44 PM, Andrew Morton
<akpm@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> Linus, can you please grab this?

Ugh. It doesn't apply cleanly. Probably for some really small stupid reason.

I can easily just look at the reject and fix it, but I don't really
want to. Why? Because I hate the MAINTAINERS file.

It's the most painful file for merging too, because everybody touches
it - kind of like the old "one single Kconfig file" was back in the
bad old days.

For example, just during this merge window:

    $ git rev-list --count --no-merges v4.12.. MAINTAINERS
    112

and while most of them obviously didn't cause any conflicts (there
were four this cycle), it's still my least favourite "stupid work".
That file pretty consistently gets 100+ changes to it:

  v4.1: 87
  v4.2: 109
  v4.3: 94
  v4.4: 91
  v4.5: 118
  v4.6: 98
  v4.7: 112
  v4.8: 121
  v4.9: 128
  v4.10: 135
  v4.11: 78
  v4.12: 127

So I'm wondering if

 (a) we could add a script to do the alphabetical ordering properly.

 (b) we could split this thing up some sane way.

Anybody got any ideas?

I'm throwing out _one_ idea: split it up by the main F: line, so that
maintainership information ends up being hierarchical like the Kconfig
files.  Teach "get_maintainer.pl" to just do "find . -name
MAINTAINERS" instead?

I'm not saying that's a great idea (quite often the "main F: line"
might be ambiguous), but it's the most obvious one.

This is not a _huge_ problem, but it has been a slight annoyance for a
long time now. So it would be good to maybe at least discuss it a bit.

Hmm?

                   Linus