"Michael S. Tsirkin" <m...@redhat.com> writes: > On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 03:19:52PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote: >> On 20 October 2014 15:15, Michael S. Tsirkin <m...@redhat.com> wrote: >> > On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 03:04:44PM +0100, Peter Maydell wrote: >> >> On 20 October 2014 10:19, Markus Armbruster <arm...@redhat.com> 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. >> >> >> Good idea. >> >> > What do you want to happen in this case? >> >> It should mail the people who are actually maintainers, >> not anybody who happened to touch the code in the last >> year. > > Right but as often as not there's no data about that > in MAINTAINERS.
The way to fix that is finding maintainers, not scatter-shooting patches to random contributors in the vague hope of hitting someone who cares. >> > I'm yet to see contributors who are annoyed but we >> > can always blacklist specific people. >> >> At the moment I just don't use get_maintainers.pl at >> all because I tried it a few times and it just cc'd >> a bunch of irrelevant people... >> >> I suspect anybody using it at the moment is either >> using the --no-git-fallback flag or trimming the >> cc list a lot. >> >> thanks >> -- PMM > > I'm using it: sometimes with --no-git-fallback, sometimes without. I'm using it, but I absolutely want to know when it falls back to git, because then I want to cheack and trim or ignore its output every single time. > IIUC the default is to have up to 5 people on the Cc list > (--git-max-maintainers). > It's not like it adds 200 random people, is it? > > Anyway experienced contributors can figure it out IMHO. Experienced contributors can figure out --git-fallback, too. What we see is contributors, especially less experienced ones, copying whatever get_maintainers.pl spits out, because they have no idea what get_maintainers.pl actually does. > Question in my mind is what do we want a casual contributor > to do if there's no one listed in MAINTAINERS. > "Look in MAINTAINERS, if not there, look in git log" > sounds very reasonable to me, better than "CC no one". But that's not what we do! We do "copy whatever get_maintainers.pl coughs up", which boils down to "use MAINTAINERS, if not there, grab some random victims from git-log". Perhaps we'd get slightly better results if get_maintainers.pl told its users clearly about the two kinds of output it may produce: maintainers (must be copied on patches), and recent contributors (you're in trouble; copying some of them may or may not help).
