On 05/06/2014 12:33 PM, Tom Rini wrote: ...
An issue with a single top-level MAINTAINERS file is that we'll get conflicts galore. What a MAINTAINERS file would give us is get_maintainers.pl from the kernel which can be helpful.
The conflicts we'll get are likely to be quite trivial to resolve though.
All changes to a particular entry should go through the subsystem tree that the entry applies to (e.g. only the USB tree should change a top-level USB entry, only an architecture or SoC tree should change an entry for drivers for that architecture/SoC, etc.)
As such, it's pretty unlikely there will be many conflicts at all except a few trivial context changes, or some add/add, add/delete conflicts of adjacent blocks. I haven't see Linus complaining about issues merging MAINTAINERS at all, and he'd complain if it was a problem.
Or, you could just say "all MAINTAINERS changes go through u-boot.git directly". Then, there will be zero conflicts.