On 4 May 2011 10:39, Matthew Brush mbrush@codebrainz.ca wrote:
On 05/03/11 17:11, Lex Trotman wrote:
2011/5/4 Enrico Trögerenrico.troeger@uvena.de:
So, if anyone knows some cool SVN stats generator or Matthew wants to pimp his Python script to produce some fancy HTML, I'd happy to replace it :).
I don't think these statistics are worth a pinch of ....
Agreed, well except they show how many commits/LOC each committer has, which is why I whipped up a little Python script for this to begin with.
Let me be clear that there is no criticism of you doing it, I hope you didn't interpret it that way, my concern is the use of such statistics, especially if published regularly.
What is the purpose? If it is to identify contributors to the project then its totally distorted and shouldn't be used.
Agreed. I just wanted to see how many commits were done by each committer within specific time periods, nothing more.
Ok
Contributors like Matthew, Jiri and many more don't get a mention. And all the translators who funnel through Frank are not mentioned in this list. At the very least it needs to grep the thanks from the changelog/commits.
Better yet, use a proper VCS that allows proper attribution :)
[...]
And use a better VCS where you don't need to have commit access to be the --author of a patch/commit :)
My concern is not about the mechanism or even really the accuracy of the statistics, more how they can be used. I recently saw a project (which I better not identify) almost destroy itself and lose many developers and contributors because such statistics were used to justify ignoring and overriding contributions when there was a disagreement. It even got to the point of commits being reverted in favour of the "more prevalent committer".
I'm not saying that Geany is in the same situation, far from it. Since there have been some rumblings around the areas of VCS and process speed, I think its best not to play with gas near the fire :-)
Aside from that issue, at least the committers are very consistent in putting a thanks in the commit message and names/email in the THANKS file. One improvement would be to do something like Scintilla does[1] on their website, though it would be tedious to maintain unless it was automated.
Yes thats a good idea. And the history is easier to maintain than just those who contributed to the latest release.
And I think that the original and major developers need to be acknowledged as well, without them we wouldn't have anything to argue over.
I honestly have no idea what the purpose of the "Regular Contributors" section in the AUTHORS file is meant to serve. If it's meant to be committers who commit less often than "Developers", it's missing some from what's in the SVN log. If it's meant to be people who, regardless of commit access, contribute regularly, it's still missing people.
Lots of them.
Cheers Lex