Hi Jonathan, thanks for your interesting article, MAINTAINERS truth and fiction, https://lwn.net/Articles/842415/.
Just some pointers to related work: Pia Eichinger has done some related analysis and work in this area as part of her bachelor's thesis on Maintainers Expectations vs. Maintainers Reality: An Analysis of Organisational and Maintenance Structure of the Linux Kernel. Simply quoting her conclusion: "We showed that around 20% of all patches were theoretically wrongly integrated when strictly analysing MAINTAINERS. The reality of integration and maintenance structure is more complicated than that, which we also explored. Furthermore, we identified 12 major subsystems of the Linux kernel. This is very helpful for an overview of the organisational structure, realistic grouping of subsystems and further Linux kernel topology discussions." Announcement and thesis here: https://lists.elisa.tech/g/devel/message/1269 https://drive.google.com/file/d/12ta2YxgEzEfrIcmWid8kwIyVEywbUjbA/view?usp=sharing As you might have noticed as well, ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl --self-test provides a few checks and warnings on the MAINTAINERS file. For a few months by now, I have been following up on new warnings appearing with ./scripts/get_maintainer.pl --self-test=patterns, excluding Documentation/devicetree/bindings/, as Mauro takes care of those often before my patches usually get accepted. In the past, I also did an analysis of what is only in THE REST, see some discussion here: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/alpine.DEB.2.21.2003090702440.3325@felia/ After a few manual clean-up attempts for files in include, I concluded that this activity needs to be at least semi-automatically done with some scripted heuristics and then sanity-checked by experts. I have not made any progress beyond that, though; it is certainly a good task for an interested student or mentee. Thanks again for your interesting article. Best regards, Lukas