Re: [PATCH 1/2] Documentation/process: maintainer-soc: Be more explicit about defconfig

[Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzysztof.kozlowski@oss.qualcomm.com>]

On 23/12/2025 16:23, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzysztof.kozlowski@oss.qualcomm.com> writes:
> 
>> It is already documented but people still send noticeable amount of
>> patches ignoring the rule - get_maintainers.pl does not work on
>> arm64/configs/defconfig or any other shared ARM defconfig.
>>
>> Be more explicit, that one must not rely on typical/simple approach
>> here for getting To/Cc list.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Krzysztof Kozlowski <krzysztof.kozlowski@oss.qualcomm.com>
>>
>> ---
>>
>> Incorrectly addressed patches for arm64/defconfig are around ~2 per month...
>> ---
>>  Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst | 6 ++++--
>>  1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst b/Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst
>> index 3ba886f52a51..014c639022b2 100644
>> --- a/Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst
>> +++ b/Documentation/process/maintainer-soc.rst
>> @@ -57,8 +57,10 @@ Submitting Patches for Given SoC
>>  
>>  All typical platform related patches should be sent via SoC submaintainers
>>  (platform-specific maintainers).  This includes also changes to per-platform or
>> -shared defconfigs (scripts/get_maintainer.pl might not provide correct
>> -addresses in such case).
>> +shared defconfigs. Note that scripts/get_maintainer.pl might not provide
>> +correct addresses for the shared defconfig, so ignore its output and manually
>> +create CC-list based on MAINTAINERS file or use something like
>> +``scripts/get_maintainer.pl -f drivers/soc/FOO/``).
>>  
> 
> Like Laurent, I don't see this as being effective.  Why is it that
> get_maintainer.pl fails here?  It seems far better to fix that, if at

Because there is no single maintainer for that file but around 60-80,
depending on the context (who owns the CONFIG symbol). We cannot print
all of them and finding actual owner is not a trivial.

> all possible, rather than expect random contributors to notice this text
> and work around the problem...?

Of course better to fix the tool. Problem is known for years (10? 15?).
Was it fixed? No, although in August finally Sebastian Reichel improved
it a bit (See 750b54513f69f1046895346ea97cc3d96584355e) but did not
solve it, because people do not run get_maintainers.pl correctly.

My template reply, so often pasted on mailing lists, always suggest to
use --no-git-fallback, but it's not the default. We could try to make it
default, but it won't solve the problem - output will be empty:

get_maintainer.pl -f --no-git-fallback arch/arm64/configs/defconfig





Best regards,
Krzysztof