2009-10-25

Fireworks of code

Everybody knows that a picture is worth a thousand words. I guess a similar statement is also true : a video is worth a thousand numbers.

So I played around with code_swarm and generated a nice video :


Banshee code swarm from Bertrand Lorentz on Vimeo.

Click on the link above to see the video in its original size on Vimeo.

If someone knows some freely available music that would make a good soundtrack for that video, please point me to it. I'd be happy to try to make a music video !

I think that's enough messing around with source code history. I should go back to actually producing some code...

2009-10-21

Who writes Banshee

I'm quite often seeing things like "Banshee is a Novell project" or "Novell announced a new Banshee release" in articles mentioning this great media player. From where I stand, those statements always felt a bit wrong.

So I played a bit with gitdm, the tool that is used to produce the stats for those "Who writes Linux" reports.
I'm only looking at the number of changesets, because the changed lines numbers are skewed by translation commits, especially if you look at a short period of time. Don't get me wrong, I love our translators, but I wanted to concentrate on the code contributions.

Full history
If you look at the whole history, starting at the first commit in June 2005 of what was called Sonance at the time, the amount of work put in by our two co-maintainers is quite visible.

4880 changesets from 159 developers

Developers with the most changesets
Aaron Bockover
2407
49.3%
Gabriel Burt
1030
21.1%
Bertrand Lorentz
137
2.8%
Scott Peterson
112
2.3%
Alexander Kojevnikov
78
1.6%

Top changeset contributors by employer
Novell
3552
72.8%
(Other)
1328
27.2%

By the way, some contributors other than Aaron and Gabriel happen to be employed by Novell, but I'm quite sure that Banshee is NOT part of their job description and that they're contributing during their free time. They are nevertheless counted under "Novell".

From 1.4.2 to 1.5.1
If you look at what happened on the master branch from the 1.4.2 release in January 2009 up to the latest 1.5.1 release, things are quite different.

639 changesets from 73 developers

Developers with the most changesets
Gabriel Burt
223
34.9%
Bertrand Lorentz
102
16.0%
Alexander Kojevnikov
76
11.9%
Aaron Bockover
74
11.6%
John Millikin
13
2.0%

Top changeset contributors by employer
(Other)
338
52.9%
Novell
301
47.1%

From 1.5.0 to 1.5.1
Concentrating on an even more recent period, between the 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 releases, the trend continues.

253 changesets from 54 developers

Developers with the most changesets
Alexander Kojevnikov
53
20.9%
Gabriel Burt
52
20.6%
Bertrand Lorentz
32
12.6%
Aaron Bockover
24
9.5%
Jack Deslippe
7
2.8%

Top changeset contributors by employer
(Other)
175
69.2%
Novell
78
30.8%

This is also quite visible in the announcement for 1.5.1 : most of the heavy lifting for two major features (shuffle modes and Auto-DJ) was done by Alexander.

So my point is : Banshee is a GNOME project, driven by a great community and lead by two loving (and loved) maintainers. Come join us !

Update : Several smart folks have pointed out that before the migration to git in April 2009, the changesets are credited to the committer, and not to the actual author of the code. So be careful, those figures are statistics, so they're certainly lying in some way.