Forums : Ohloh General Discussion

Do lines of code which are no longer in the repository's HEAD count in the statistics shown?

evands about 18 years ago

For Subversion, we look only at the trunk. We'll see anything which was ever part of the trunk.

We never look at any branches, even if files on the trunk came from a branch originally.

If you create a file on a branch, do a bunch of editing, and then copy that file onto the trunk, we will never see all of that prior editing. To us, it will appear as if the file was born fully formed at the moment it entered the trunk. We will account all of its lines added at that moment, and credit them all to the person who moved the file into the trunk.

Similarly, if you delete a trunk file, or if you move a file from the trunk into a branch, we immediately account all of its lines of code as removed, and credit the removal to the person who did the move or delete. The file will no longer will be reflected in the total net lines of code for the project, but its prior creation and its deletion will be reflected in the historical graphs.

Sometimes these explanations are more confusing than helpful. Let me know if I haven't addressed your question.

Robin Luckey about 18 years ago

Nope, that makes sense. I was just trying to figure out how it worked out that certain developers ended up ranked waaaay higher in activity than is True in terms of project contributions. One of them did a lot of work with an SQL-based plugin which has never been included in the program proper, but is in trunk and includes the full SQLite source code... and the other, several years ago, had a huge block of code (most of which since then completely deleted). The first makes more sense, after realizing (now) that SQLite is 'credited' towards him. I'm still not sure on the second... :)

evands about 18 years ago

Perhaps some confusion comes from the fact that we've been reporting lines changed, which is not equal to the net lines of code produced by a person.

Lines changed is the postive sum of lines added and lines removed. If you add one line of code and then remove it, you get credit for two lines changed. If you add up all of the lines changed for all of the developers in a project, this number far exceeds the actual net lines in the project.

We did this because we were looking for a measure of overall activity. If you fix a bug and the net result is removing a few lines of code, we felt that there should be some metric somewhere that gives you credit for that, not a penalty.

Also, lines changed could give a sense of the amount of churn that occured along the way to creating the net result.

Perhaps this isn't the greatest metric to be reporting, and all of this stuff is open for change in the future. We'd be delighted to hear ideas for metrics from the community. We'd like to keep the metrics as easy to understand as possible while remaining interesting. Often, keeping the site understandable is our biggest challenge.

Robin Luckey about 18 years ago

Maybe it would be useful not to count mere changes in whitespace as changed lines, if you're not already doing that. At least diff has several options to ignore empty lines and changes in whitespace (indentation and things like that)

Edit: never mind, just read indentation changes are already ignored. Sorry for the noise!

Jonas Maebe about 18 years ago