In an overwhelmingly large series of 556 patches, Joe Perches attempted to track down maintainers for a significant number of files within the Linux kernel source tree. He explained, "I grew weary of looking up the appropriate maintainer email address(es) to CC: for a patch", adding a new line format to the kernel MAINTAINERS file parsed by a new get_maintainer.pl script.

Much of the feedback was criticism of the large number of patches that flooded the inboxes of all subscribers to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Others suggested that the information would be better extracted from Git than from source files. When Joe asked for better ideas for achieving his end goal, Alan Cox suggested, "working off the git tree as it shows who actually is making changes/updating stuff recently and why which is a major clue when tracing bugs". Chris Wright pointed out, "I think this data will easily become stale. What is the point again?" going on to add "between git (or gitweb), existing MAINTAINERS and a bit of common sense (or extra sleuthing), I never perceived a significant problem." Adrian Bunk countered, "for active kernel developers like you and me it's not a problem. But for other people it's non-trivial to always figure out who the maintainer of some part of the kernel is."