Re: [PATCH] get_maintainer: Gracefully handle files with authors but no signers

[Joe Perches]

On Thu, 2022-09-22 at 16:01 -0700, David Matlack wrote:
> Gracefully handle the case where a file has no signers (e.g. has not
> been modified within the last year) but does have authors (e.g. because
> there are local commits that modifies the file without Signed-off-by
> tags). This scenario could happen for developers whose workflow is to
> add Signed-off-by tags as part of git-format-patch rather than as part
> of git-commit.

I think that's a poor process.

> Today this scenario results in the following non-sensical output from
> get_maintainer.pl:
> 
>   Bad divisor in main::vcs_assign: 0
>   "GitAuthor: David Matlack" <dmatlack@xxxxxxxxxx> (authored:1/1=100%,added_lines:9/9=100%,removed_lines:3/3=100%)

Interesting...

> There are two issues with this output: the "Bad divisor" error and the
> garbled author name. Both stem from this line in vcs_find_signers():
> 
>   return (0, \@signatures, \@authors, \@stats) if !@signatures;
[]
> Returning 0 for the number of commits and a non-empty list for the
> authors results in the "Bad divisor". The garbled author name comes from
> the fact that @authors is the raw, unparsed, output line from git-log.
> Code later in vcs_find_signers() actually parses out the name and drops
> the "GitAuthor: " prefix.
> 
> Fix this by returning an empty list instead of @authors and @stats to
> make them coherent with the fact that commits is 0.
[]
> diff --git a/scripts/get_maintainer.pl b/scripts/get_maintainer.pl
[]
> @@ -1605,7 +1605,7 @@ sub vcs_find_signers {
>  
>  #    print("stats: <@stats>\n");
>  
> -    return (0, \@signatures, \@authors, \@stats) if !@signatures;
> +    return (0, (), (), ()) if !@signatures;

There's probably some better mechanism, not sure what it is though
as I don't have equivalent commits in the actual tree.

And I think you need \() and not () as what's returned is a reference
to an array and not an array or maybe use undef.

>      save_commits_by_author(@lines) if ($interactive);
>      save_commits_by_signer(@lines) if ($interactive);