Re: [python-committers] number of active core devs [was: Comments on moving issues to GitHub]
On Sun, Jun 03, 2018 at 12:44:55PM -0700, Brett Cannon wrote:
> I will admit that I think we lost some core devs who had zero exposure to
> GitHub prior to switching and never found the motivation to ramp up on the
> new workflow.
*raises hand*
I'm one of them. Not that I was a prolific core dev, but I did have
commit priviliges.
I'm not a full-time programmer, and the discipline of using VCS does not
come naturally to me. Without doing it daily, or even weekly, it always
feels like friction rather than something helpful. (Intellectually, I
understand the benefits, but emotionally it is another story.)
It took me a long while to get used to hg, and just when I had, we
changed to git and everything I thought I knew was wrong :-)
Add to that some unrelated changes in my personal life, and my
motivation to learn the new workflow dropped to not just zero but became
negative. But I've keep up with the community, and I feel my motivation
gradually increasing. It's now above zero and just waiting on me finding
time :-)
(Given today's news about Microsoft and Github, I'll probably just learn
the Github workflow in time for us to move to something different again
*wink*)
Long ago, when we first started discussing this move, I asked if we had
an objective measure of what would count as "success" in the move. I'm
not sure I was ever answered, but given the motives expressed at the
time ("make it easier to recruit core devs" I think was one of them) I
don't think the move has been a complete success.
That's not to call it a failure: it clearly hasn't been that, and to
those who know git and like github, it has clearly been a win for them.
But I think it is important to acknowledge which of our goals were met
and which were not.
--
Steve
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Re: [python-committers] number of active core devs [was: Comments on moving issues to GitHub]
2018-06-03 3:07 GMT+02:00 Guido van Rossum : > The best course of action seems to be to take measures to acquire new > committers (and contributors), not to try and reactivate old inactive > committers. My advice is to spend more time on mentoring and less time to write code yourself. In my experience, it's the fatest way to train a contributor to become a core developer. I almost succeeded to train someone up to a core dev, but the contributor asked to not become a core right now for personal reasons. I hope that it will happen soon ;-) Victor ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
Re: [python-committers] number of active core devs [was: Comments on moving issues to GitHub]
On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 at 18:08 Guido van Rossum wrote: > Sounds to me like these are probably just past committers who are no > longer active for whatever personal reasons, and took no action when we > moved to GitHub. We basically never remove the commit bit from anyone > except by request, and I only recall seeing one such request, ever. Some of > them probably expect to come back in the future (like Neil Schemenauer > did). I recall only one person who said they refused to move to GitHub (but > AFAIK we didn't remove their commit bit from b.p.o), so I don't think that > we can blame these numbers on the move to GitHub. > This assessment is accurate. The b.p.o count is everyone who has ever been a core dev since we moved there (October 2006), while the GitHub number is anyone who said "I want to keep my commit bit" and provided me with their GitHub username when we moved plus any new members to the team. I actually plan to clean up the list on b.p.o at some point and at least take off folks' commit marker if the person doesn't have their GitHub username set (I don't know if removing people's Contributor role should be done as well since if someone has not set their GH username they probably don't know how our current workflow works either). Based on the number after that and personal motivation I will see if I want to bother doing a direct correlation with the actual list from GitHub. > > It's definitely disturbing that we have so few active committers though -- > it means that a small number of people take on a lot of the load (my > intuition tells me it's even more skewed than Mariatta's numbers reveal). > The best course of action seems to be to take measures to acquire new > committers (and contributors), not to try and reactivate old inactive > committers. > I will admit that I think we lost some core devs who had zero exposure to GitHub prior to switching and never found the motivation to ramp up on the new workflow. As for acquiring new committers, I think we should try to mine who is authoring code as well as who is contributing reviews of PRs. That way we can bubble up folks who are helping out in that regard (I personally would also be interested in who is committing code, but I don't think that will be as useful). The former can be done with a git checkout, the latter will require going through the GitHub API to get the data. > > On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 5:42 PM, Donald Stufft wrote: > >> Is that a 50% reduction or is that just 50% of the people who could be >> active are? >> >> Sent from my iPhone >> >> > On Jun 2, 2018, at 8:33 PM, Ethan Furman wrote: >> > >> >> On 06/02/2018 12:46 PM, Mariatta Wijaya wrote: >> >> >> >> And perhaps this is to be discussed in a separate thread: even though >> in the b.p.o we appear to have 170 committers, >> >> really there are 90 core devs (people who has commit right to CPython >> on GitHub). and out of those 90, I think only >> >> about half are currently active (since the migration to GitHub). >> > >> > 50% reduction in activity? Ouch. >> > >> > -- >> > ~Ethan~ >> > ___ >> > python-committers mailing list >> > python-committers@python.org >> > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers >> > Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ >> >> ___ >> python-committers mailing list >> python-committers@python.org >> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers >> Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ >> > > > > -- > --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) > ___ > python-committers mailing list > python-committers@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers > Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ > ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
Re: [python-committers] number of active core devs [was: Comments on moving issues to GitHub]
On 3 June 2018 at 11:07, Guido van Rossum wrote: > Sounds to me like these are probably just past committers who are no > longer active for whatever personal reasons, and took no action when we > moved to GitHub. We basically never remove the commit bit from anyone > except by request, and I only recall seeing one such request, ever. Some of > them probably expect to come back in the future (like Neil Schemenauer > did). I recall only one person who said they refused to move to GitHub (but > AFAIK we didn't remove their commit bit from b.p.o), so I don't think that > we can blame these numbers on the move to GitHub. > OpenHub [1] shows the average rate of commits declining fairly steadily since the exceptional ~40-commits-per-day spike in September 2016 down to our current steady state of ~4 commits per day (we still get spikes up to 10+ commits per day for PyCon US and the core dev sprints, but not of the magnitude of previous sprints). Those metrics only record the actual commit rate (not the code churn rate), so some of that may be due to the switch to a PR based workflow with pre-merge CI reducing the volume of fix-up commits, and I also don't know how the switch from our patch-and-merge-forward workflow in Mercurial to the squash-merge-and-cherry-pick workflow in git affects the accounting. While the switch to GitHub does show up clearly in the "contributor" stats on OpenHub, the move to git is also when the VCS metadata started recording the committer and author information separately in a way that OpenHub can read (rather than only providing the patch author information in the commit message and NEWS entry), so someone would need to go back and extract the real pre-git contributor metrics to make that a valid comparison. On the issue management & patch review side of things, while https://bugs.python.org/issue?@template=stats does show the number of open issues with patches declining slightly post-migration, it's since leveled off and then started climbing again. So based on the numbers we're seeing, my own assessment would be that the move to GitHub didn't hurt, but it also didn't really help address the review bottleneck problem either (which surprises me as much as it does anyone else - perhaps now that patch reviews are more pleasant to engage in, we're also making them more thorough?). Cheers, Nick. [1] https://www.openhub.net/p/python -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
Re: [python-committers] number of active core devs [was: Comments on moving issues to GitHub]
Sounds to me like these are probably just past committers who are no longer active for whatever personal reasons, and took no action when we moved to GitHub. We basically never remove the commit bit from anyone except by request, and I only recall seeing one such request, ever. Some of them probably expect to come back in the future (like Neil Schemenauer did). I recall only one person who said they refused to move to GitHub (but AFAIK we didn't remove their commit bit from b.p.o), so I don't think that we can blame these numbers on the move to GitHub. It's definitely disturbing that we have so few active committers though -- it means that a small number of people take on a lot of the load (my intuition tells me it's even more skewed than Mariatta's numbers reveal). The best course of action seems to be to take measures to acquire new committers (and contributors), not to try and reactivate old inactive committers. On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 5:42 PM, Donald Stufft wrote: > Is that a 50% reduction or is that just 50% of the people who could be > active are? > > Sent from my iPhone > > > On Jun 2, 2018, at 8:33 PM, Ethan Furman wrote: > > > >> On 06/02/2018 12:46 PM, Mariatta Wijaya wrote: > >> > >> And perhaps this is to be discussed in a separate thread: even though > in the b.p.o we appear to have 170 committers, > >> really there are 90 core devs (people who has commit right to CPython > on GitHub). and out of those 90, I think only > >> about half are currently active (since the migration to GitHub). > > > > 50% reduction in activity? Ouch. > > > > -- > > ~Ethan~ > > ___ > > python-committers mailing list > > python-committers@python.org > > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers > > Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ > > ___ > python-committers mailing list > python-committers@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers > Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ > -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
Re: [python-committers] number of active core devs [was: Comments on moving issues to GitHub]
Is that a 50% reduction or is that just 50% of the people who could be active are? Sent from my iPhone > On Jun 2, 2018, at 8:33 PM, Ethan Furman wrote: > >> On 06/02/2018 12:46 PM, Mariatta Wijaya wrote: >> >> And perhaps this is to be discussed in a separate thread: even though in the >> b.p.o we appear to have 170 committers, >> really there are 90 core devs (people who has commit right to CPython on >> GitHub). and out of those 90, I think only >> about half are currently active (since the migration to GitHub). > > 50% reduction in activity? Ouch. > > -- > ~Ethan~ > ___ > python-committers mailing list > python-committers@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers > Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/ ___ python-committers mailing list python-committers@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-committers Code of Conduct: https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
