Bassi: Who wrote GTK+ (Reprise)

[Posted September 16, 2015 by n8willis]

At his blog, GNOME's Emmanuele Bassi has published some statistics on developer contributions to GTK+, dating back to the 2.0 release cycle. He also provides some context for interpreting the raw numbers. "Disparity in the length of the development cycles explains why the 2.12 and 2.14 cycles, which lasted a year, represent an anomaly in terms of contributors (148 and 140, respectively) and in terms of absolute lines changed. The reduced activity between 2.20 and 2.24.0 is easily attributable to the fact that people were working hard on the 2.90 branch that would become 3.0." This historical analysis is a follow-up to Bassi's development statistics about GTK+ 3.18, also published this week.

Bassi: Who wrote GTK+ (Reprise)

Posted Sep 17, 2015 8:34 UTC (Thu) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link] (2 responses)

Reviewing patches is not the first priority of GTK+ maintainers. Contributors often need to ask on IRC for a review (sometimes several times, sometimes with no results), we often see questions on the mailing list about whether sending patches on bugzilla is enough (which in theory is true). And sometimes experienced developers complain on their blog about how they were initially motivated to contribute to GLib/GTK+ but due to a lack of reviews they abandoned.

Instead, some maintainers prefer to spend more time developing themselves the toolkit. It's a choice, it's probably more fun than reviewing patches all the time. And more complicated problems are solved this way, because most contributors only fix easy bugs, documentation problems, or small features.

BUT to grow a free software community in the long run, I think reviewing patches is important. After some time, a small percentage of contributors can become sub-maintainers, so there are more reviewers, so patches are reviewed more quickly and the development accelerates. It's a virtuous circle.

See for example the Linux kernel, Linus doesn't code anymore, he “just” reviews patches, merge branches, discuss new features, etc.

Bassi: Who wrote GTK+ (Reprise)

Posted Sep 17, 2015 8:58 UTC (Thu) by hadess (subscriber, #24252) [Link] (1 responses)

You're versed in the toolkit. None of the current maintainers were maintainers from the get-go either. Maybe start by helping review those patches that aren't getting reviewed? And you might end up being a maintainer yourself ;)

Bassi: Who wrote GTK+ (Reprise)

Posted Sep 17, 2015 11:34 UTC (Thu) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424) [Link]

You're right, I could pre-review GTK+ patches and say “take this review with a grain of salt, I'm not a GTK+ maintainer”. I did that one time for GtkTextView, alongside bug triaging. But I guess contributors are reluctant to do reviews when they are not maintainers, afraid of being wrong. On bugzilla the 'reviewed' flag for a patch can be used for that, and a real maintainer can change it to 'accepted-commit-now' or add more comments.

That said, ebassi's articles are a great initiative, it at least demonstrates that the GTK+ community didn't shrink over time, but it also shows that it didn't really grow.

With statistics, it also encourages people to contribute more.