How many authors have their contributions in #curl product source code? How many have had their previous work completely removed. Over time.
The first #curl release with code present authored by 200 persons was done in 2015-04-22. In that release, we had already removed all traces of contributions from 20 authors.
In the latest release, 604 authors' code is still present. 171 authors' work have been replaced.
my script runs "git blame" on the product code base for all files for every release tag and counts everyone who had their name "on" a code line for that release. Then counts how many in total plus how many that has had at least a line before but does not anymore.
@bagder Just because a person no longer has any lines attributed to them in git blame doesn't mean none of their code remains. They could have had their contributed lines simply changed by something like a refactor that renames a variable or adds another argument to a function.
Of course, any metric isn't going to be perfect, doing it via git blame is probably the best you can reasonably do, but worth keeping in mind even that users who don't show up that way may still be authors.
I tweaked made my script to use git blame -CCC instead, which actually made it end up with more authors left. It also made the script MUCH slower 😁
I decided to drop the plot for how many that was "gone" because it was not possible to make it correct and it made delta-updates of the graph quite impossible.
@bagder I think it's interesting that only 1/5th of the authors had their work fully replaced. I wonder how many of those are drive-by oneliner commits.
@bagder I guess the "removed all traces" part is on lines most recently changed by the author, shown by git blame. So refactoring work could remove a persons contribution while their work is still providing value to curl.
@mrFred489 oh absolutely. A contribution took the work forward. Then someone else can build on that and take it further, and sometimes a subsequent step ends up changing all lines of a previous author. Does not take away the help the original author brought!
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