[RFC] automatic CC generation for patch submission

[Dan Aloni]

Hello,

I'd like to present a suggestion for automatic generation of 
carbon copy fields in the E-Mails of posted patches.

Basically, instead of manually figuring out who to add to CC
when sending a patch to LKML by looking at MAINTAINERS, a 
script can look at '.maintainers' files spread across the
source tree and automatically generate a proper list of CCs
for a patch.

To illustrate: If a patch affects a file under 
drivers/net/e1000, the CC script will look at these files

  drivers/net/e1000/.maintainers
  drivers/net/.maintainers
  drivers/.maintainers
  .maintainers

... to gather up the mailing list addresses or an individual 
maintainer inbox address.

A posssible format for this file could be a newline-separated
list of:

  [filename wildcard]:e-mail

For example, drivers/scsi/.maintainers would contain:

  libiscsi.*:open-iscsi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
  scsi_*.c:scsi-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  etc...

Or, instead (or in addition) of having a '.maintainers' file 
each directory we can modify source files by adding parsable 
'/* MAINTAINER: name@domain */' comments. 

Some extensions to the popular E-Mail clients might be needed 
here. Also, a bot reading LKML would automatically send links 
about posted patches to the other mailing lists whenever 
someone forgets to add a CC.

Any comments?

-- 
Dan Aloni
XIV LTD, http://www.xivstorage.com
da-x (at) monatomic.org, dan (at) xiv.co.il
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