Zope's entry into the commit count pissing match

Zope's entry into the commit count pissing match

Mark Ramm-Christensen of the TurboGears project starts what looks like it will be a great commit count pissing match . I know that wasn't his intent. He just wanted to show the TurboGears project is active. But nevertheless, this kind of thing tends to get rather silly rather quickly, so we certainly can't leave Zope out!

Amounts of commits on a project are only a very vague measurement of project activity. Some projects may have more frequent, smaller commits than others, depending on project culture. Or maybe people with more commits simply make more mistakes! It's also only a single measurement of project activity. Lines of code changed might make more sense, but it's harder to do. Determining what belongs to the project and what does not is very tricky though. There are also other measurements of community activity. Amount of documentation produced, say. Or package release frequency on PyPI.

Anyway, back to Zope. How does it fare in this? We're not dead yet either, after all. In the month of june alone, the svn.zope.org repository saw 663 commits. In the last 30 days or so, Mark's measurement, we got 796 commits (give or take 10; I'm not being strict with day boundaries here). Almost 800!

If we start pulling in commits from other projects related to Zope but not kept in svn.zope.org, we'd get a bigger number. We could go counting commits in the Plone collective, for instance. If we included commits of projects that we sometimes use with Zope, such as SQLAlchemy and Paste, we'd get even more commits. That'd be silly though, as we've already won!

Hah! :)