I just did some analysis of our MAINTAINERS file with the aid of a local copy of the public-inbox archive of qemu-devel, and (unless my scripting is broken ;-)) of the 258 emails listed in MAINTAINERS, 50 have not sent an email to qemu-devel in the last three years.
Some of that will be things like "the address somebody uses to send to the list is not quite the same as the one they have listed", so it will need some manual checking, but I think this shows we could use a bit of spring-cleaning of the file to remove stale entries. I propose to send some (not cc'd the list) emails to these people, asking (politely!) if they're still interested in being in the MAINTAINERS file, and treating "email bounces", "no" and "no reply within a month" as "I'm no longer interested in being cc'd on patches". Then we can update the file accordingly. (This was prompted by a series I sent out earlier today getting a load of "address unknown" bounce-mails from a corporate server; that's not a particularly rare thing to happen IME. And I also have developed a habit of manually curating cc lists to drop people I suspect of not actually being involved any more...) thanks -- PMM
