[Themaintainers] Interesting look at meta-maintenance and the Linux Kernel

[Lachlan Simpson]

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, MAINTAINERS. But the MAINTAINERS file, too, must be maintained; how well does it reflect reality?
...
If one were to try to draw some overall conclusions from this data, they might read something like the following. The MAINTAINERS file definitely has some dark corners that could, themselves, use some maintenance (some of which is already being done <https://lwn.net/ml/netdev/20210114014912.2519931-1-kuba@kernel.org/>). 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.

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/842415/c73c4fd04f89749f/
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