Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] get_maintainer.pl: Default to --no-git-fallback

[Markus Armbruster]

Kirill Batuzov <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tue, 21 Oct 2014, Markus Armbruster wrote:
>
>> "Michael S. Tsirkin" <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> > On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 03:04:44PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote:
>> >> On 20 October 2014 10:19, Markus Armbruster <address@hidden> wrote:
>> >> > Contributors rely on this script to find maintainers to copy.  The
>> >> > script falls back to git when no exact MAINTAINERS pattern matches.
>> >> > When that happens, recent contributors get copied, which tends not be
>> >> > particularly useful.  Some contributors find it even annoying.
>> >> >
>> >> > Flip the default to "don't fall back to git".  Use --git-fallback to
>> >> > ask it to fall back to git.
>> >> >
>> >> > Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <address@hidden>
>> >> 
>> >> Good idea.
>> >> 
>> >> Reviewed-by: Peter Maydell <address@hidden>
>> >> 
>> >> -- PMM
>> >
>> > What do you want to happen in this case?
>> > Won't this cause even more patches to fall to the floor?
>> >
>> > The benefit seems marginal, the risk high.
>> >
>> > I would be OK with this if you also go over history
>> > and assign maintainers to all core files which lack
>> > maintainers listed in MAINTAINERS.
>> 
>> Define "core files".
>>
>
> Files implementing common infrastructure used in different guests on
> different hosts? This probably is the least covered in MAINTAINERS part.
> MAINTAINERS covers pretty well target architectures, host architectures
> and guest machines (each of them is a well-defined independent subsystem).
> On the other hand a lot of common files are missing from MAINTAINERS:
> cpu-exec.c, hw/core/*.c, cputlb.c etc.
>
>> I don't think I (or anyone) should *assign* maintainers.  We've always
>> let people volunteer for the maintainer role.  Prodding them to
>> volunteer is fine, but shanghaiing them outright is a different matter.
>> 
>
> May be we can start searching for volunteers by making a list of
> unmaintained files grouped by subsystems? It is hard to find volunteers
> when we do not know exactly what we need them for.

Yes.  I listed directories with many files at the end of this message:

>> We do have too may files lacking maintainers.  See
>> 
>>     Subject: MAINTAINERS leaves too many files uncovered
>>     Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 11:19:44 +0200
>>     Message-ID: <address@hidden>
>>     https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2014-10/msg01951.html

The message also shows how to list unmaintained files:

    $ for i in `git-ls-files`; do [ "`scripts/get_maintainer.pl -f 
--no-git-fallback $i`" ] || echo $i; done

I didn't include the full list because it's fairly big (~65KiB).

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