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

From: Joe Perches
Date: Wed Jul 19 2017 - 21:05:09 EST


On Wed, 2017-07-19 at 17:08 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I can easily just look at the reject and fix it, but I don't really
> want to. Why? Because I hate the MAINTAINERS file.
>
> It's the most painful file for merging too, because everybody touches
> it - kind of like the old "one single Kconfig file" was back in the
> bad old days.

> For example, just during this merge window:
>
> $ git rev-list --count --no-merges v4.12.. MAINTAINERS
> 112
>
> and while most of them obviously didn't cause any conflicts (there
> were four this cycle), it's still my least favourite "stupid work".
> That file pretty consistently gets 100+ changes to it:
>
> v4.1: 87
> v4.2: 109
> v4.3: 94
> v4.4: 91
> v4.5: 118
> v4.6: 98
> v4.7: 112
> v4.8: 121
> v4.9: 128
> v4.10: 135
> v4.11: 78
> v4.12: 127
>
> So I'm wondering if
>
> (a) we could add a script to do the alphabetical ordering properly.
>
> (b) we could split this thing up some sane way.
>
> Anybody got any ideas?
>
> I'm throwing out _one_ idea: split it up by the main F: line, so that
> maintainership information ends up being hierarchical like the Kconfig
> files. Teach "get_maintainer.pl" to just do "find . -name
> MAINTAINERS" instead?

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.