Subject: Re: Effectively tracing project contributions with git

From: Joseph Wakeling <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 02:10:49 +0200

Sverre Rabbelier wrote:
> Git stats can aggregate diffs, so it can show you "this author made
> changes to this many lines to this file in total", but it doesn't work
> across renames. It also has an option to aggregate that to a total per
> project number, but I'm not sure how useful that is to your case, as
> you seem to be interested in a per-file/line basis? I agree with Jeff
> that you'll need to define more precisely what it is you want to know
> :).

That would certainly be a very useful function -- it wouldn't solve my
problem for me but would make it easier to identify core authors.  After
all, 'number of commits' doesn't necessarily correspond to meaningful
contribution -- many of them could be editorial -- but number of lines
(or the ratio of lines to commits) could be a much better indicator.

I don't see any solution that doesn't see me browsing diffs -- there's
no metric that will solve the problem -- but if your stats work could
help me get an output of the form 'here are all the diffs on file X by
contributor Y in order of size, largest first' then I think it would
help a LOT.

Is there a website where I can read more about your stats/metrics work?
 Beyond the applications to the present problem I have some other
reasons to be very interested in what can be done with git history stats.

Thanks & best wishes,

    -- Joe