Re: Effectively tracing project contributions with git

Jeff King wrote:

Yes, that's pretty much what I'm looking for. My thoughts on contribution run along much the same lines as yours -- there's a need to distinguish between meaningful additions and mere tweaks.

My general rule is that stuff like whitespace changes, changing the name of variables, typo corrections etc. is not a meaningful contribution although if someone had really done a lot of it I might see things differently. Substantial additions -- extending the code, comments or documentation -- are what I'm after. Ultimately this has to be decided by me actually looking at things rather than metrics.

What I'm doing right now is to run a git shortlog on a file to get a rough idea of the contributors and who are likely to be the main authors, then using gitk to browse the commits for that file. It's time-consuming but works -- once I've identified at least one major commit from someone I can ignore everything else by them and concentrate on the remaining contributors.

What would help is some way to speed up the process of getting someone's commits: 'give me all the diffs for file X by author Y'. I'm not too good at shell scripting so grep-y things don't spring easily to mind.

An alternative useful tool would be 'give me all the commits to this file that change more than N lines'.

With those two -- particularly the first -- I think I'd be able to get a fair way. It won't work for the files where there has been a lot of moving of content or renames, but that's mostly in the docs -- the code, which is the really important thing, doesn't seem so bad (so far).

Thanks very much for the advice and careful thoughts,

Best wishes,

    -- Joe