While every project has a MAINTAINERS file there are large variations as to how it is structured and what it actually contains. It would be good to create a standard structure with guidelines as to what it should contain.
In particular, the staff wants to have contact info for the maintainers which is not easy to get. LF IDs and Github IDs for instance are not sufficient.
2 Comments
Tracy Kuhrt
Another concern from the TSC is in helping to understand the diversity of the maintainers when looking at the decision to move to active state. Because of this, we may want to include organization affiliation in the MAINTAINERS file, as well.
David Huseby
Each project needs to also decide on how maintainers are selected and when the list of maintainers gets reviewed. There should be a documented process for the maintenance of the MAINTAINERS file. Does that go in a GOVERNANCE file? or in the MAINTAINERS file? Since we're going to want to make the MAINTAINERS file consumable by a script, may I suggest adopting TOML or YAML as the format? With YAML it supports having multiple logical "documents" in a single file. They are separated by a single line with
---. This would allow the MAINTAINERS file to have a machine parsable list of maintainers then a separate blob of text that explains how/when the maintainers is updated.