Re: Contributor Summit planning

On Mon, Aug 13, 2018 at 02:19:07PM -0700, Stefan Beller wrote:

However the mailing list participation numbers there doesn't really
help me:

~/git-ml$ git shortlog --since 2017 -sne
  3721  Junio C Hamano [off-list ref]
  2166  Stefan Beller [off-list ref]
  2071  Jeff King [off-list ref]

and I certainly do not provide as much value as Junio or you do;
I am just good at resending long patch series to drive up the email
count. But I think that data would be also interesting to look at if
we were to find out what drives the community.

Maybe some derived metrics posts on mailing list divided by
commits appearing in origin/next can guide if one is a effective
contributor; but then as you said there are other ways to contribute
effectively as well.

You could probably just drop any emails that start with "[PATCH" from
your count. They are ultimately counted separately in "git shortlog" on
the actual repo. And if you are sending tons of re-rolls you just do not
get any credit. ;)

The rabbit hole is deep there, though. Is it productive to have bugs in
your patch which force somebody else to reply (they get a point, good),
and then you have to respond explaining what's going on (you get a
point, bad, since you're now ahead of a hypothetical you who didn't have
the bug in the first place).

So I try not to think too hard on metrics, and just use them to get a
rough view on who is active.

Reviewing and bug triage do show up in the mailing
list but not as commits in git.git, but the numbers alone would
not hint at the quality. In fact the opposite is the case: if you only
need one email to diagnose a bug, suggest a workaround and
include a proper patch, it is more helpful to the community than
having more emails, potentially going back and forth.

Yep, another good example. More emails may mean you are incompetent at
diagnosing, or it may mean you are digging on a particularly hard
problem.

-Peff