Commits on CVS branches not counted as contribution

Avatar

erAck

9 months ago

The statistics for OpenOffice.org (probably as well as those for projects working similar) have a serious flaw: commits on CVS branches are not counted as contribution. OOo development takes place on CVS branches of selected modules, so-called Child Workspaces (CWS), that are integrated to HEAD when a feature or fix is ready and QA'ed. So the main contributors listed on http://www.ohloh.net/projects/29/analyses/latest/contributors are actually the release engineers who merge the CWS branches to HEAD, or contributors committing HTML of the web sites to HEAD, but not the actual code contributors. It looks as if developers ceased to contribute code in 2003, back when we introduced the CWS handling..

Regards Eike

Avatar

erAck

9 months ago

So, do you guys care about this or not? Will it be changed? In near future?

Avatar

Robin Luckey

9 months ago

Hi erAck,

Sorry, I missed your original post.

Yes, of course we care about this! Our metrics are the core of our service and we want them to be as accurate as possible. We know that branching is a real limitation for Ohloh, and it affects a lot of projects. It's something we thought we'd have had time to fix by now, but it turns out running a website keeps one very busy.

Right now we are spending all of our development efforts opening up our source code. We're hoping that if we get community involvement, that will free up our own development time to focus on the core problems.

I believe that after the push to open our code is complete, we may have some time to spend on our source control adapters, which would include a Git upgrade, adding branching to CVS, and possibly adding more source control systems. We're a small team and our schedule changes rapidly, so it could take a few months to get there.

But I'm also hoping that once the code is open, others might lend a hand on these types of things.

Robin

Avatar

erAck

9 months ago

Your statistics leave a wrong impression about projects. You should at least remove automatically generated statements such as "Decreasing year-over-year development activity" for projects that develop on branches. Just to give you an idea about the dimension of this error:

My commits to the OOo code base, according to Bonsai, from 2000-10-06 to 2008-01-18: 11130

Counted by Ohloh: 739

Eike

Avatar

ender.saka

8 months ago

I want to add my voice to this request.

In my project I result as the only contributor, while there is another developer that is contributing with an entire branch. I would like to give him credits and put his effort into enlistments as like as mine.

Avatar

colinleroy

7 months ago

Hi,

Still no change planned on that?

Avatar

Robin Luckey

7 months ago

Still planned, but no change yet.

Avatar

ahuggel

5 months ago

Is this still an issue?

After adding the exiv2 project today I was a bit surprised to find it has a "decreasing year-over-year development activity". Maybe this should read "most of the development was done in the unstable branch recently" here?

But anyway, you're offering a cool service with a pleasant interface. Thanks!

Andreas

Post a Response