Re: [PATCH] git(1): remove a defunct link to "list of authors"

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Dec 12, 2012, 12:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20121212122448.GA20057@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CACsJy8Dg1a0siDbiHtk4m1RhjLt-XKiS8kOO7qPKjwRczLF9vA@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 07:04:40PM +0700, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> > With or without "--no-merges", the big picture you can get out of
> > "git shortlog -s -n --since=1.year" does not change very much, but
> > the headline numbers give a wrong impression.
> 
> These numbers are approximate anyway. Commit counts or the number of
> changed lines do not accurately reflect the effort in many cases. And
> about merges, in this particular case of Git where the maintainer imo
> has done an excellent job as a guard, I'd say it's the credit for
> reviewing, not simply merging.

I agree that commit count is approximate. But counting merges is really quite a large factor of error (in git.git, it more than doubles Junio's count, and represents over 20% of the total number of commits).

The GitHub contributors page counts merges _and_ fails to use mailmap. Yuck. I'm working on fixing that now.

> But not using the link is fine too. We can wait for Jeff's patch to be
> merged.

After the discussion in the PR, I am inclined to think the site (and possibly the manpage) should just point to some decent contributors graph (either GitHub, ohloh, or something else; suggestions welcome). Anything else is just recreating a crappy static version of something that could be much more dynamic and explorable.

I find the ohloh one a little more informative than the GitHub graph. I couldn't find any others (Google Code does not seem to have one, kernel.org and other gitweb sites do not, and I can't think of anywhere else that hosts a mirror).

-Peff