Re: [PATCH] get_maintainer/MAINTAINERS: confine K content matching to patches

[Joe Perches]

On Thu, 2023-10-05 at 11:06 -0700, Justin Stitt wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 4, 2023 at 7:40 PM Joe Perches <joe@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, 2023-10-04 at 21:21 +0000, Justin Stitt wrote:
> > > The current behavior of K: is a tad bit noisy. It matches against the
> > > entire contents of files instead of just against the contents of a
> > > patch.
> > > 
> > > This means that a patch with a single character change (fixing a typo or
> > > whitespace or something) would still to/cc maintainers and lists if the
> > > affected file matched against the regex pattern given in K:. For
> > > example, if a file has the word "clang" in it then every single patch
> > > touching that file will to/cc Nick, Nathan and some lists.
> > > 
> > > Let's change this behavior to only content match against patches
> > > (subjects, message, diff) as this is what most people expect the
> > > behavior already is. Most users of "K:" would prefer patch-only content
> > > matching. If this is not the case let's add a new matching type as
> > > proposed in [1].
> > 
> > I'm glad to know  you are coming around to my suggestion.
> :)
> 
> > 
> > I believe the file-based keyword matching should _not_ be
> > removed and the option should be added for it like I suggested.
> 
> Having a command line flag allowing get_maintainer.pl
> users to decide the behavior of K: is weird to me. If I'm a maintainer setting
> my K: in MAINTAINERS I want some sort of consistent behavior. Some
> patches will start hitting mailing list that DO have keywords in the patch
> and others, confusingly, not.

Not true.

If a patch contains a keyword match, get_maintainers will _always_
show the K: keyword maintainers unless --nokeywords is specified
on the command line.

If a file contains a keyword match, it'll only show the K:
keyword  if --keywords-in-file is set.

> To note, we get some speed-up here as pattern matching a patch that
> touches lots of files would result in searching all of them in their
> entirety. Just removing this behavior _might_ have a measurable
> speed-up for patch series touching dozens of files.

Again, not true.

Patches do _not_ scan the original modified files for keyword matches.
Only the patch itself is scanned.  That's the current behavior as well.