Re: [RFC] MAINTAINERS tag for cleanup robot

[Tom Rix <trix@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/22/20 10:22 AM, Joe Perches wrote:
> On Sun, 2020-11-22 at 08:33 -0800, Tom Rix wrote:
>> On 11/21/20 9:10 AM, Joe Perches wrote:
>>> On Sat, 2020-11-21 at 08:50 -0800, trix@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>>>> A difficult part of automating commits is composing the subsystem
>>>> preamble in the commit log.  For the ongoing effort of a fixer producing
>>>> one or two fixes a release the use of 'treewide:' does not seem 
>>>> appropriate.
>>>>
>>>> It would be better if the normal prefix was used.  Unfortunately normal is
>>>> not consistent across the tree.
>>>>
>>>> So I am looking for comments for adding a new tag to the MAINTAINERS file
>>>>
>>>>    D: Commit subsystem prefix
>>>>
>>>> ex/ for FPGA DFL DRIVERS
>>>>
>>>>    D: fpga: dfl:
>>> I'm all for it.  Good luck with the effort.  It's not completely trivial.
>>>
>>> From a decade ago:
>>>
>>> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1289919077.28741.50.camel@Joe-Laptop/
>>>
>>> (and that thread started with extra semicolon patches too)
>> Reading the history, how about this.
>>
>> get_maintainer.pl outputs a single prefix, if multiple files have the
>> same prefix it works, if they don't its an error.
>>
>> Another script 'commit_one_file.sh' does the call to get_mainainter.pl
>> to get the prefix and be called by run-clang-tools.py to get the fixer
>> specific message.
> It's not whether the script used is get_maintainer or any other script,
> the question is really if the MAINTAINERS file is the appropriate place
> to store per-subsystem patch specific prefixes.
>
> It is.
>
> Then the question should be how are the forms described and what is the
> inheritance priority.  My preference would be to have a default of
> inherit the parent base and add basename(subsystem dirname).
>
> Commit history seems to have standardized on using colons as the separator
> between the commit prefix and the subject.
>
> A good mechanism to explore how various subsystems have uses prefixes in
> the past might be something like:
>
> $ git log --no-merges --pretty='%s' -<commit_count> <subsystem_path> | \
>   perl -n -e 'print substr($_, 0, rindex($_, ":") + 1) . "\n";' | \
>   sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Thanks, I have shamelessly stolen this line and limited the commits to the 
maintainer.

I will post something once the generation of the prefixes is done.

Tom