Re: Validating MAINTAINERS entries?

[Lukas Bulwahn <lukas.bulwahn@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 10, 2022 at 2:13 AM Stephen Hemminger
<stephen@networkplumber.org> wrote:
>
> Several times in the past, when using MAINTAINERS list either automatically
> (or from manual entry) have found the mailing address in the file is no longer valid.
>
> What about doing an annual probe mail to all maintainers and sending
> a patch to prune out any addresses that auto respond as dead.
> This won't catch ghost entries but would find any dead ones.
>

In many cases, you can avoid the noise of sending out a probe mail,
but simply checking the lore.kernel.org archives for an email response
from that email within the last year.
Many maintainers are simply going to be active, so that.

Then, you may consider just the remaining cases:

Some maintainers use a different email for responding than for
receiving patches. The email address for receiving patches is in
MAINTAINERS, the email address for responding is visible on
lore.kernel.org.
Some maintainers do not even need to respond within the last year, as
no patches were sent to the maintainer's area of responsibility.
Some emails are in fact dead.

Alternatively, you could just offer "a service" for kernel developers
to forward the automated emails from servers, when an email is dead,
to some other email, and then, you go through those and create the
needed patches to MAINTAINERS.

Anyway, creating this clean-up patch for MAINTAINERS is probably still
some semi-automated effort and not fully automatic (as e.g., you
probably want to split this patch going to different subsystem
maintainers and get their acknowledgement), though.

I am also aware of many other clean-up aspects in MAINTAINERS. Just
trying to keep ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl --self-test=patterns
without warnings is already a task that can keep you busy, which I now
know from trying to do so for two or three years.


Lukas