<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div>Since the release of the 5.5 kernel in January 2020, there have been almost
87,000 patches from just short of 4,600 developers merged into the mainline
repository. Reviewing all of those patches would be a tall order for even
the most prolific of kernel developers, so decisions on patch acceptance
are delegated to a long list of subsystem maintainers, each of whom takes
partial or full responsibility for a specific portion of the kernel. These
maintainers are documented in a file called, surprisingly, <span class="font" style="font-family:menlo, consolas, "courier new", monospace;">MAINTAINERS</span>.
But the <span class="font" style="font-family:menlo, consolas, "courier new", monospace;">MAINTAINERS</span> file, too, must be maintained; how well does
it reflect reality?<br></div><div>...<br></div><div>If one were to try to draw some overall conclusions from this data, they
might read something like the following. The <span class="font" style="font-family:menlo, consolas, "courier new", monospace;">MAINTAINERS</span> file
definitely has some dark corners that could, themselves, use some
maintenance (some of which is <a href="https://lwn.net/ml/netdev/20210114014912.2519931-1-kuba@kernel.org/">already being
done</a>). There are some parts of the kernel lacking maintainers that
could definitely use one, and other parts that have aged beyond the point
of needing maintenance. For the most part, though, the subsystems in the
kernel have designated maintainers, and most of them are at least trying to
take care of the code they have responsibility for. The situation could be
a lot worse.<br></div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/842415/c73c4fd04f89749f/">https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/842415/c73c4fd04f89749f/</a><br></div></body></html>