Yep, I blew it [LWN.net]

Yep, I blew it

Posted Feb 17, 2010 20:18 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: How old is our kernel? by jzbiciak
Parent article: How old is our kernel?

The 41% number was wrong; the article has been edited with the correct data.

For the curious: the bug was a combination of the tool descending into the .git directory (which has no history of its own) and it attributing unknown lines to the oldest release. That essentially inflated the number of "old" lines in the full kernel by about 2 million - enough to make a big difference.

Please accept my apologies for the screwup. I'd taught the program to avoid .git a while back, but I thought it was an efficiency improvement only; I didn't realize it had messed up the full-kernel numbers. Embarrassing.

(Log in to post comments)

Yep, I blew it

Posted Feb 17, 2010 21:30 UTC (Wed) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

Nah, you obviously didn't blow anything - awesomely informative stats, thanks Jon :)

No worries!

Posted Feb 17, 2010 22:10 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]

No worries! The new number makes much more sense. Since I've seen elsewhere that drivers seem to make up a pretty big portion of the tree, it makes sense that the center of gravity for change-rate would land near there too.

I guess I wasn't too far off (in orders of magnitude) on the number of unaccounted-for lines in the data, although I did undercall it by a factor of 4.

Man, the kernel's gotten huge! I actually tried to download the latest kernel and untar it in a 300MB partition, and it b0rked out, filling the disk only part-way into the "drivers/" directory. Next time I'll do it on a machine with a more generous disk space allotment. :-)