linux-kernel - Related work to MAINTAINERS truth and fiction

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Message-ID: <CAKXUXMzj=LYJK74Le+rYnAaY3ji6AxugppwHwneAEL_xTTAyGw@mail.gmail.com>
Date:   Fri, 15 Jan 2021 07:57:51 +0100
From:   Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@...il.com>
To:     Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>
Cc:     Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Pia Eichinger <pia.eichinger@...oth-regensburg.de>,
        Ralf Ramsauer <ralf.ramsauer@...-regensburg.de>,
        Wolfgang Mauerer <wolfgang.mauerer@...-regensburg.de>
Subject: Related work to MAINTAINERS truth and fiction

Hi Jonathan,

thanks for your interesting article, MAINTAINERS truth and fiction,
https://lwn.net/Articles/842415/.

Just some pointers to related work:

Pia Eichinger has done some related analysis and work in this area as
part of her bachelor's thesis on Maintainers Expectations vs.
Maintainers Reality: An Analysis of Organisational and Maintenance
Structure of the Linux Kernel. Simply quoting her conclusion:

"We showed that around 20% of all patches were theoretically wrongly
integrated when strictly analysing MAINTAINERS. The reality of
integration and maintenance structure is more complicated than that,
which we also explored. Furthermore, we identified 12 major subsystems
of the Linux kernel. This is very helpful for an overview of the
organisational structure, realistic grouping of subsystems and further
Linux kernel topology discussions."

Announcement and thesis here:
https://lists.elisa.tech/g/devel/message/1269
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12ta2YxgEzEfrIcmWid8kwIyVEywbUjbA/view?usp=sharing

As you might have noticed as well, ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl
--self-test provides a few checks and warnings on the MAINTAINERS
file. For a few months by now, I have been following up on new
warnings appearing with ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl
--self-test=patterns, excluding Documentation/devicetree/bindings/, as
Mauro takes care of those often before my patches usually get
accepted.

In the past, I also did an analysis of what is only in THE REST, see
some discussion here:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/alpine.DEB.2.21.2003090702440.3325@felia/

After a few manual clean-up attempts for files in include, I concluded
that this activity needs to be at least semi-automatically done with
some scripted heuristics and then sanity-checked by experts. I have
not made any progress beyond that, though; it is certainly a good task
for an interested student or mentee.

Thanks again for your interesting article.

Best regards,

Lukas