Cheers for the release of Linux-2.6.29.
Seems Jonathon has released statistic of 2.6.29 on LWN, although I
can't access the article now.
Maybe I should subscribe to LWN later :)
Here is my statistic, anyone without LWN subscribing can see it first
and maybe look at LWN next week.
Detail statistics are on site: http://remword.com/kps_result/
Here I'd happy to introduce two interesting graphs, which are attachments.
1. first_time_commiter.JPG
Anyone, even who has full experiences on kernel hacking, had an experience
to commit his/her first patch to kernel. It's important to know how many first
time commiters are taking part into kernel development, because it indirectly
tells us who and how many of them are joining the party to help Linux.
In this graph, we can see, in every release circle, about 200-300 "new" engineers
joined the development since "git age"(from 2.6.12-rc2)
On the other hand, one data I didn't collect is that how many engineers left
the development of kernel, but I can say "a lot of" people have left the kernel
hacking work by various reasons. Because from the statistics we know 4796
people committed patches, but in 2.6.29 circle, we have only 1180 people continue
the kernel development, although most of the key developers stayed.
2. report_review_test.JPG
"Signed-off-by" and "Acked-by" were the most important data to tell the kernel
contribution. And "Reported-by", "Reviewed-by" and "Tested-by" were not regarded
as important as they deserved. But things are changing now.
In this graph, we can see more and more "Quality Control" works, such as bug-report,
code review and testing be regarded by kernel developers.
This doesn't say that kernel developers didn't regard Quality Control work as important
before, it tells us not only "coding things" can help kernel growing, but also a
lot of other works can help kernel to be stronger.
Best Regards
Wang Chen