Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Fixing the Kernel Janitors project

[Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>]

On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 05:36:57PM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
 > On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 04:23:52PM -0700, Luck, Tony wrote:
 > > > My raw numbers show that the number of individual kernel contributors
 > > > continues to increase with every release, so this might not be as much
 > > > of a problem as it's made out to be.
 > > 
 > > That depends on whether we are gradually adding to the pool
 > > of developers, or seeing an increasing stream of newcomers
 > > who supply a patch or two before disappearing again.
 > > 
 > > If you look at the list of contributors some old release for
 > > which we have good data (say 2.6.16).  How many of those people
 > > contributed to each of the following releases? Does the
 > > decay curve look steeper or more gentle if you start from
 > > a more recent release?
 > 
 > I don't know, I haven't tracked the people individually that way, only
 > looked at the basic numbers of developers per release.

Are you just doing something like
 git log v2.6.16..v2.6.17 | grep ^Author: | sort -u| wc -l  

or do you have some script that maps addresses to people ?
One person may appear once in 2.6.20, and then a half dozen times
in 2.6.21 if they use multiple email addresses for example.
(Also, typos, and people using full hostnames in their sign-off's
 instead of email addresses skew this somewhat).

I'm guessing the latter, due to the graph thing you did. Pointers?

	Dave

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