On 07/19/2017 05:08 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 2:44 PM, Andrew Morton
> <a...@linux-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.
Yeah, I have already thought about that one. I may get around tuit
one day. Or maybe Joe could/would.
> (b) we could split this thing up some sane way.
makes sense.
> Anybody got any ideas?
(c) funnel all changes thru Andrew (but really foo should be able to make
changes to her MAINTAINERS entry)
> 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.
--
~Randy
