Re: [PATCH RESEND v4] MAINTAINERS: fix lots of alphabetic ordering

[Randy Dunlap]

On 07/19/2017 05:08 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 2:44 PM, Andrew Morton
> <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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