Re: [RFC] How to (automatically) find the correct maintainer(s)

From: Richard Knutsson
Date: Mon Jan 15 2007 - 12:59:52 EST


Stefan Richter wrote:
On 15 Jan, Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:
Stefan Richter wrote:
On 14 Jan, Richard Knutsson wrote:
(Really liked the idea to have a "Maintainer"-button next to "Help" in *config)
Rhetorical question: What will this button be used for?
Having "all(tm)" information of something in one place?

Or, "click here to say 'it does not work'"?

My rhetorical question wasn't about what it is intended for, but what
people would think it was intended for if it was there.

I think it could be practical to have an easy access to whom is responsible for a driver and which mailinglist its development is addressed to, both for people interested in helping develop the driver and those who got an error (or fan-mail :).
I think adding the Maintainers-data is more or less a logical next step.

It's not always clear from the MAINTAINERS-file who is the right person
for what. Especially as it is a rather large text-file with only
mediocre search-friendlieness. It's a 3.5 K-lines file!

So when you know that you have a problem with drivers X, wouldn't it be
great if you could just "go to" the driver in *config and see not only
the Help-Text but the Maintainers-Data also.

Seems more like what you actually want to have there is links to users'
mailinglists or forums.

When this thread started, it was about assisting authors in submitting
patches.

Yes, this is a bit out of scope, but just realized a simple way to implement it if using the CONFIG_FLAG-approach, just "grep" after the flag, under which the user hit the "Maintainer"-button, in the MAINTAINER-file. Also, I think this solves the handler-problem since an entry can have multiple CONFIG_FLAG's stated.

I don't think we should add the maintainer-entries directly in Kconfig, as you Stefan stated, because it is for configure the kernel. With the above approach, it will just require minor fixes in the "make *config" to handle it.

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