Comments and questions about graph

Posted Apr 7, 2008 21:23 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (guest, #24648)
Parent article: Where 2.6.25 came from

First of all, many thanks to Linus (for git and its repository enabling the compilation of these statistics), Greg KH, Amanda, and our editor (for the article and gitdm), René Descartes (for the coordinate system bearing his name on which a function like ΔLOC/Δt can be plotted), and to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz for discovering (inventing?) differential calculus, all of which allows me to comment on, and ask about, our editor's informative graph:

Overall, the entire plot is relatively constant slope (with a barely-perceivable increase in more recent times)--this means that the rate of kernel development appears to be in a state of steady development, with a hint of increased patch submission rate in the newer releases.

However, there's one thing I notice mildly unusual: the steep vertical rises of new code submissions in the patch windows of 2.6.23 and .24 are taller than previous ones, with their matching stabilization periods correspondingly longer.

Yet, with the overall slope nearly constant, this would seem to imply that the stabilization period (shallow slope) is proportional to the number of patches submitted at the release window (steep slope).

Are the stabilization periods becoming longer because of the additional time to test all the new code? Or, is more code being submitted at the release window due to the longer time between releases? Thanks again!

P.S. I calculate ΔLOC/Δt ≅ (5.5M - .5M) LOC / 2 yr ≅ 1 new LOC every 12.6144 seconds.