Some development statistics for 6.2

Posted Feb 22, 2023 15:35 UTC (Wed) by Nikratio (subscriber, #71966)
Parent article: Some development statistics for 6.2

Here's an idea for the next such article: maybe you could look at how the population of kernel developers changes over time?

If for a given kernel there's hundreds of new first-time contributors, what happens to them afterwards?

The overall number of contributors does not seem to be changing that much. So are the new contributors replacing older contributors, or do they never come back after the first patch?

What happens to new contributors

Posted Feb 22, 2023 16:00 UTC (Wed) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (3 responses)

The number of contributors to each release does continue to grow.

Meanwhile, I have at times looked at lost contributors — those who contributed to a given release for the last time. The problem is that such a signal is necessarily old; we do get people who show up every few years to fix something that bothers them. You can never really say that somebody is gone.

What happens to new contributors

Posted Feb 22, 2023 16:45 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Maybe stats to say how many contributors have contributed to how many kernels?

Dunno how far you want to go back, but maybe multiply the "contributors to the current kernel" by say 4, and then provide stats for the most prolific "contributed to X kernels" contributors up to that number.

Yes that will lose the "drive by" contributors, but it'll give an insight into the "now and then" contributors. Ten years is probably a good time window.

Cheers,
Wol

What happens to new contributors

Posted Feb 24, 2023 9:15 UTC (Fri) by Nikratio (subscriber, #71966) [Link]

You are completely right. I do not see why this makes the data less interesting though :-).

Another interesting thing may be to plot a histogram of current developers vs number of past kernels they have contributed to. This would tell us more about how much of the kernel comes from regular contributors vs occasional ones.

What happens to new contributors

Posted Feb 27, 2023 16:46 UTC (Mon) by sima (subscriber, #160698) [Link]

I guess you could fix that by only peeking a constant amount of time into the future for every release. And then maybe for the oldest release you look at make a statistics of how many people returned that your arbitrary cut-off (maybe 1y or so) counted as lost?

Still a pile of scripting work to generate those numbers ...