Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Tue, 14 Aug 2007 03:51:36 +0200 | | From | Rene Herman <> | | Subject | Re: [PATCH] [1/2many] - FInd the maintainer(s) for a patch - scripts/get_maintainer.pl |
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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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