Re: [PATCH] Documentation: propose community voting process

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Sat, Oct 24, 2026 at 02:18:56PM +0300, Tuomas Ahola wrote:

> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> > [...]
> > I previously mentioned "topic count", but commits are far easier to
> > count.  So instead of requiring two topics in released versions,
> > perhaps requiring five commits would be easier to implement and
> > explain.
> > 
> 
> Quoting the summit notes:
> 
> } * Emily: Have we used a voting process for something like this before?
> } 
> } * Patrick: We need proposals and a vote. Who would be allowed to vote?
> } 
> } * Peff: Active developers with a track record; perhaps a threshold such
> }   as 50 merged patches.
> } 
> 
> So it seems that Peff's proposed threshold was substantially higher
> than what has been put forth in this thread.  Any comments on that?

I'm a bit behind on the list and haven't been following this discussion
closely yet, but I'll just say: the number 50 was made up by me on the
spot. So I wouldn't read too much into it.

But if somebody is picking a number, looking at "git shortlog -ns
--no-merges | sort -rn" may be interesting, just to get a sense of how
many people we are talking about:

  - there are 44 people with >= 200 commits
  - there are 133 people with >= 50 commits
  - there are 439 people with >= 10 commits
  - there are 2388 people with >= 1 commit

At some point it gets kind of unwieldy.

I saw proposals elsewhere to cut it by time. I think "N commits in the
last M years" is awkward, because there are people who have been around
for a long time with steady but slow participation steady-but-slow
participation. But if you just intersect "N commits over all time" and
"has _any_ commits in the last M years", then you can get a table like:

total    | Active in the last N years
commits  |  N=1    N=2    N=3    N=5
----------------------------------------------------
    200  |   17     22     24     30
     50  |   34     47     56     67
     10  |   71    104    124    155
      1  |  239    357    457    628

Those aren't necessarily perfect metrics, but if we consider them good
enough and just want to tune the parameters, we could probably pick a
spot in the table that has about the number of votes we'd want to deal
with.

-Peff