Distribution of commits/changes per author over time

[allanday]

Looking at the blog post, there's no mention of the distribution of commits/changes per author over time. It would be really interesting to know if the GNOME project has become more or less dependent on its core developers.

This could be charted as mean/standard deviation over time, or it might be interesting to do distribution charts for specific years.

@felipeborges @neilmcgovern

[hpjansson]

Oh, that 's a good idea!

[hpjansson]

We could also create cohorts based on the authors' all-time commit count. So instead of colors based on which year the members started interacting with the project, it'd be a color for 1-9 commits, another for 10-99, yet another for 100-999, etc. Then you could see when the big committers are more active compared to the smaller ones. These cohorts could be used in the active-contributors and commit-count charts, which would tell you e.g. "how many level 100-999, ... committers were active, per year" and "how many commits were made by level 10-99 committers, per year".

Part of why I'm suggesting this is also because it's easy to do -- add a new SQL query and reuse all the plotting and histogram code.

[allanday]

We could also create cohorts based on the authors' all-time commit count.

I'm a bit unsure about using all-time commit count to identify "core contributors". One obvious issue would be cases where you have low level commits over a long period.

[hpjansson]

I think someone doing polish/bugfixing or maintaining infrastructure consistently over a long time is likely important to the project. Although not as critical as someone speccing and writing the next version of GTK. I also received comments to the effect that measuring contributions by commits is unfair, from someone who spent a lot of time on analysis and API design that resulted in relatively few commits.

We should probably define what a "core developer" is.