Re: Followup of yesterday's design session "refactoring the REST"

["Jürgen Groß" <jgross@suse.com>]

On 09.07.20 11:22, Jan Beulich wrote:
> On 09.07.2020 07:56, Jürgen Groß wrote:
>> Yesterday's design session at Xen Developer Summit "Hypervisor Team: .."
>> had one topic regarding whether we should find specific maintainers of
>> all the files currently assigned to "THE REST" in order to lower the
>> amount of reviews for those assigned to be "THE REST" maintainers.
>>
>> Modifying the MAINTAINERS file adding "REST@x.y" as REST maintainer
>> and running the rune:
>>
>> git ls-files | while true; do f=`line`; [ "$f" = "" ] && exit; \
>> echo $f `./scripts/get_maintainer.pl -f $f | awk '{print $(NF)}'`; \
>> done | awk '/REST/ { print $1}'
>>
>> shows that basically the following files are covered by "THE REST":
>>
>> - files directly in /
>> - config/
>> - most files in docs/ (not docs/man/)
>> - misc/ (only one file)
>> - scripts/
>> - lots of files in xen/common/
>> - xen/crypto/
>> - lots of files in xen/drivers/
>> - lots of files in xen/include/
>> - xen/scripts/
>> - some files in xen/tools/
>>
>> I have attached the file list.
>>
>> So the basic idea to have a "hypervisor REST" and a "tools REST"
>> wouldn't make a huge difference, if we don't assign docs/ to "tools
>> REST".
>>
>> So I think it would make sense to:
>>
>> - look through the docs/ and xen/include/ files whether some of those
>>     can be assigned to a component already having dedicated maintainers
>>
>> - try to find maintainers for the other files, especially those in
>>     xen/common/ and xen/drivers/ (including the related include files, of
>>     course)
> 
> At least for files in xen/common/ I think it was really intentional
> that they - as core hypervisor files - fall under THE REST. We could

Depends on the files. Those files are under xen/common/ as they are not
architecture dependent. I agree that many of those files are core
hypervisor files, but OTOH e.g. common/sched/core.c has dedicated
maintainers in spite of being a core file.

I don't think files like xen/common/gdbstub.c or xen/common/xenoprof.c
fall in this category, so revisiting the file list would surely be a
good idea.

> of course have a "Core Hypervisor" (or so) group, which would already
> ...
> 
>> - if any of the REST maintainers doesn't want to receive mails for a
>>     group of the remaining REST files split the REST maintainers/files up
>>     accordingly
> 
> ... allow moving some into this direction.

Yes.

> For files under xen/drivers/ not currently covered by other entries it
> may indeed be (more) feasible to find individual maintainers.

I agree.


Juergen