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

[Joe Perches]

On Wed, 2017-07-19 at 21:24 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 19, 2017 at 6:05 PM, Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > Just for ease of manipulation and not breaking the script much,
> > I'd suggest just having a MAINTAINERS directory and stuffing
> > each of the sections into separate files.
> > 
> > The script would only need to add $ cat MAINTAINERS/* as input.
> 
> So I don't mind the idea of just making MAINTAINERS a directory, but I
> don't think we want to so far as to make one file per entry. That's
> what, 1500+ files tiny files or so? Seems a bit excessive.
> 
> Maybe we can just do the prefix thing and just do 26 files A-Z
> instead? Or maybe go by first word (so all the ARM things would go in
> one place?)
> 
> A couple of hundred files sounds fine. A couple of thousand files
> sound a bit excessive..

$ ls MAINTAINERS.tmp/ | wc -l
1735

<shrug>

A couple thousand individual maintainers is also excessive.

Most maintainers in MAINTAINERS aren't really much involved.

A-Z is arbitrary and still difficult to find because it's
not descriptive as to whatever is actually maintained.

As a concept I think individual files would be better.
But maybe grouping by subsystem instead of by letter.

Maybe by mirroring the directory layouts.

<by arch>
drivers/net
drivers/scsi

etc...