Re: git-who

On Wed, 8 Oct 2008, Johannes Sixt wrote:

I suspect "-sn" is better. It sorts by number rather than by name, and if you're interested in who has touched a file, you probably wants to know who has touched it _most_.

And as usual, the nice thing about it is that all the normal git rules apply, so you can do it by multiple files or subdirectories, and you can filter by time. And ignore merges, since they tend to be about upper-level maintainers than about the people doing patches.

So for the kernel, you can do something like

	git shortlog -ns --no-merges --since=6.months.ago drivers/scsi include/scsi

and see who has been doing scsi-related stuff lately.

Of course, when it comes to relevance, it may be more interesting to just look at 'git blame' output, and then you're limited to single files at a time. And performance is going to be a problem, especially if you enable movement detection.

But we don't have anything special for that. You can do it with something like

	git blame -M -w kernel/sched.c |
		grep -v '^^' |
		cut -d'(' -f2- |
		cut -c1-20 |
		sort |
		uniq -c |
		sort -n

which will ignore the root commit (so as not to give me all the credit for old history), but it would probably be better (but more complex - need perl or some other "real" language with associative arrays etc to remember the commit information) to parse the output of "git blame --incremental" instead.

		Linus