Contributors to Drupal 7.x - Code Freeze Looming Update
The code freeze for Drupal 7.x is looming large on the horizon. From that point on we will be limited in what kinds of changes we can get into Drupal core. For some the code freeze is a time of relief: it means we are down to bug fixes and the final release should be coming soon. For others it is a hard time - bug fixing isn't always as fun as adding new features.
So, as we head into feature freeze it seemed like a good time to run some statistics on who has been contributing the most to Drupal 7.x so far.
Contributors to Drupal 7.x. Through August 10th
Following on from previous times that I've run these stats, I've published documentation of the process to get the data on groups.drupal.org. This time I went straight to the commit messages stored in database tables on drupal.org This has the benefit of counting new files as well as old files (the last times I did this it only counted changes to existing files).
So, who are the top 10 people based on the number of times their name is in a commit message?
| Name | Commit mentions |
|---|---|
| Damien Tournoud | 192 |
| catch | 179 |
| chx | 123 |
| pwolanin | 113 |
| Dave Reid | 109 |
| boombatower | 95 |
| yched | 77 |
| c960657 | 57 |
| drewish | 56 |
| Berdir | 56 |
The total number of mentions is 3133, so those top 10 are responsible for roughly 33% of the code. On the flip side, people with 3 or fewer mentions are responsible for roughly 15% of the code. We still have a long tail of 222 people who are mentioned in only one message. We see a fairly typical "long tail" distribution: the people who are most involved do a lot of the work, but the people who only get mentioned a few times each are still responsible for a large number of commits when aggregated together.
| Commit mentions | Count of people with that number |
|---|---|
| 1 | 222 |
| 2 | 80 |
| 3 | 38 |
| 4 | 17 |
| 5 | 15 |
| 6 | 13 |
| 7 | 8 |
| 8 | 7 |
| 9 | 5 |
| 10 | 6 |
| 11 | 1 |
| 12 | 3 |
| 13 | 3 |
| 14 | 5 |
| 15 | 2 |
| 16 | 2 |
| 17 | 1 |
| 18 | 1 |
| 19 | 2 |
| 20 | 1 |
| 21 | 1 |
| 22 | 5 |
| 23 | 2 |
| 24 | 3 |
| 26 | 3 |
| 27 | 2 |
| 31 | 1 |
| 33 | 1 |
| 35 | 1 |
| 36 | 1 |
| 39 | 1 |
| 40 | 2 |
| 45 | 2 |
| 52 | 1 |
| 54 | 1 |
| 56 | 2 |
| 57 | 1 |
| 77 | 1 |
| 95 | 1 |
| 109 | 1 |
| 113 | 1 |
| 123 | 1 |
| 179 | 1 |
| 192 | 1 |
The current number is at 469 contributors to Drupal 7. That's good, but we'll need about 300 more to beat the number for Drupal 6.x One concern from adding simpletests to Drupal 7 was that it might lock people out of the process. I don't think that's the case, but it will be interesting to see how things go as the code freeze passes.
Mashup the data
I've posted the parsed data as a CSV file to groups.drupal.org and a Google Spreadsheet so that other people can download it and look for other bits of information.
Previous Reports:
In January 2009 I did a similar analysis: Drupal 7: Who is Providing Patches for the Next Release?.
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Comments
Do you have documentation
Do you have documentation anywhere on your methodology for doing this analysis?
"[T]hose top 10 are
"[T]hose top 10 are responsible for roughly 33% of the code" -- technically that's 33% of the commits. Major contributions like DBTNG, which probably counted as one or two of Crell's commits, account for a huge percentage of the code. Just a technical nitpick. :) This is fun data to look at -- thanks for putting it together.
Absolutely - it's a very
Absolutely - it's a very rough analysis of the contribution but it is the best one we have.
It also doesn't count people who do doc reviews or provide the ideas that eventually become contributions. All of those things are valuable, but it's much harder to quantify them. The analysis is only as good as the data we have available ;)
Perhaps collating all
Perhaps collating all usernames from all issue ques that do include simply "subscribe" or short ones that include "duplicate" and do a simple weighting based on number of comments and attached files.
Just an idea...
For instance, I lurk and offer code reviews, but have never written a patch that has made it into Drupal. I spend 10-15 hours a week on these activities.
Josh
Interesting that it is also
Interesting that it is also spot-on the apocryphal "80/20 rule" of powerlaws. 20% of the contributors make 80% of the patches, and vice versa. In this case, I've got 20% of patches coming from 78.9% of contributors.
The 80/20 rule is a common occurrence in economics, particularly regarding wealth and poverty ratios (ie 20% of the people hold 80% of the wealth), but Clay Shirky likes to use it to talk about online collaboration.
(by the way, Damien Tournoud and his 192 patches are missing from the second table)
Hmm. Misuse of the word
Hmm. Misuse of the word "apocryphal." Not sure what I was thinking.