A look at the 3.12 development cycle

I suspect that a lot of code written to take "as many lines as possible" would be rejected, especially since there's an established format. So while lines of code are only a rough estimate of effort, lines of code are still strongly correlated with effort.

You could try using a SLOC-counting tool that strips out comments and blank lines.

If hiring management looks at LoC to hire, it is them to blame for demise of their company. IMO, just contributing to the kernel is enough for most positions, but more LoC also means revealing more about the talent, just more material to look in the eyes of the wise :)

Well, one thing that would interest me is checking _negative_ metrics - how many patches were reverted? What's the distribution of CVEs among git blame? The main problem I see there is that while these are 'negative' metrics in the sense of 'there was a problem' they'd likely get interpreted in the sense of 'this person is a problem'.

The _benefit_ is that they might indicate places where more documentation, more review, or other such things are needed. If, for instance, (random subsystem, not actually based on anything) networking code sees a higher rate of reversions or CVEs per commit or changed line, that could be a damn good signal that there needs to be some examination of why it happens. It could be that networking code is just plain more exposed as an attack surface, but it could also be something resolvable.

From another angle, debiting reversions against the reverted patch author's commits and lines of code could be interesting as a reverted commit is a no-op in terms of useful change, even though (as Linus has had to point out at times) it's certainly not a no-op in terms of code.

Another interesting thought is the number of first-time contributors per kernel, or new email domains (likely correlated to new companies becoming involved in development) - those would be well worth bringing up, and acknowledging them could have beneficial effects by rewarding participation (and providing a signal to people like me of companies that might be worth looking into/supporting/checking out the products of).