Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtchang | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the single developer argument should be too much of a concern in an open source project. I saw Michael of ffmpeg had a lot of commits. In my experience with both closed and open sourced projects this is usually the case. There is one person that wrote the majority of the code.

The great thing about open source is that even if they step away it's not like the code is going anywhere. To an end user of ffmpeg it would still continue to function.

I personally had no idea ffmpeg was forked to libav until one day I tried to install it in Ubuntu and was like...wtf. Then I installed libav and went about my day.

His commit rate is high partly because he merges all libav commits too.

That's covered in the article; the projects both use git, so libav commits are merged with the original committers intact, not under someone else's name.

But the merge commits are still authored by Michael. Not having looked at the git repository, but if merges happen often, that can very much artificially inflate the number of commits attributed to him, except if the stats were gathered with --no-merges.

Are the commits from libav merged or cherry-picked/rebased? In any case, I would hope the stats were gathered with --no-merges; if not, that would indeed skew the stats.

There's a merge commit for each commit pulled from libav (and it's frequently not empty, as the codebases have diverged and so conflicts are common).

While it's true that Michael generates lots of merge commits, if you click the link in LWN article to Andreas Cadhalpun's mail [1], then you can read that following commands were used to generate statisticts:

  Libav:
  $ git shortlog -ns --no-merges v11..HEAD | head -n15
  FFmpeg:
  $ git shortlog -ns --no-merges n2.4..HEAD | head -n15

  [1] https://lwn.net/Articles/650830/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com