Forums : Feedback Forum

According to http://ohloh.net/factoids/52081 , only 5 people contributed to ejabberd over the entire history of the project, and only 2 of them did last year. This is not true! If you look at: http://ejabberd.jabber.ru/credits you can see that in fact 50 people contributed to ejabberd over the entire project history and 26 did so last year. I do not think this is a Small development team ;-)

Proposals:
1) Make the texts about contributors less misleading by making clear that these numbers are about people who commited code to the repository and that several projects limit write access to some people that commit the patches/code of other people after a review of the code/patch (which is not a bad thing IMO because it will mean the development code works mostly and thus allows easier beta testing/bug fixing).

2) Allow people to add a link to credits pages like http://ejabberd.jabber.ru/credits on the factoids page.

3) Automatically add a link to AUTHORS and/or CREDITS files in the source repository on the factoids pages.

entel over 18 years ago

entel,

I agree that Small development team is a mischaracterization of ejabberd. The factoid is technically true, but it discounts the work going on behind the scenes.

As you already understand, Ohloh derives all of it reports strictly by reading the source code repository logs. This is a mixed blessing. On the positive side, it allows us to render some very basic, undeniable truths about a project which are impossible to find elsewhere, and which are very difficult to falsify. On the down side, it can make us blind to things which do not happen directly in the source code.

It may not console you much, but all projects on Ohloh are subject to the same mechanistic rules.

I readily agree with your proposal #1. We will take a look at the wording on the project page and in the factoid and try to come up with something more precise.

BTW, if you are using a development model where a few administrators are responsible for committing patches from numerous developers who don't have write access to the repository, you might want to look into a source control system that better matches that model. Git (and I suspect Darcs) will do this, and this is the source control system and patch administration model used by the Linux kernel team. When an administrator approves and applies a patch to the main repository, that patch preserves its authorship information, which is why the Linux kernel project report on Ohloh lists over 1000 contributors. Another nice feature of Git is that you don't need a central server to host the code. Can you tell that I am a big fan of Git?

Proposal #2 begins to address more directly the main problem we are discussing: what happens if someone disputes aspects of the Ohloh metrics, or wants to add some commentary? For now, we've put a discussion forum on each project as a place to discuss the report, but I admit that these forums are not readily visible and there has not been much activity on them. This is a general question we're still thinking about. Ideas?

I like your proposal #3 very much as well. We would additionally like to link to the LICENSE and README files. There are some technical hurdles for us to overcome before we start allowing online browsing of the source code, but that is a feature we are planning to implement.

We want Ohloh to be simple, accurate, and trustworthy. I welcome your input.

Thanks,
Robin

Robin Luckey over 18 years ago

Regarding Git: since recently there is a specific Subversion repository for ejabberd modules development which is less restricted. Not all of these modules (are intended to) become part of the mainstream ejabberd distribution in the future.

entel over 18 years ago