On 9/3/2010 11:55 PM, Roan Kattouw wrote: > 2010/9/4 Robert Leverington <[email protected]>: >> In the past all paid developers worked remotely (at least, not in the >> same office as one another), and there still are paid developers who >> work remotely. Additionally, all volunteers work remotely. Based on my >> experience with MediaWiki I would say that development in the past was >> significantly more efficient and community involved than it is currently. >> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_prompter_hoc > > The fact that we have scalability (in terms of code review) and > transparency issues now that we have a number of devs in one office > while we didn't have them back in the day when there was only one dev > at the office doesn't mean the concentration of developers in the > office *caused* these issues, much less that undoing said > concentration will fix them. > > For instance, the activity level in the MW SVN repository grew > significantly about 2 years ago if memory serves [1] , and our code > review infrastructure shrunk by 50% with Brion's departure just under > a year ago rather than being expanded. This has to be one of the main > causes of the current code review situation, and I don't believe > concentrating devs in the office made much if any difference here.
It grew, then has mostly been dropping since. The total number of commits is down from a peak in 2008. There were 5% fewer commits overall in 2009 than 2008, and there were 20% fewer in phase3. 4 of the top 5 months for most phase3 commits are in 2008. Based on the number of 2010 commits to date, it will be a similar drop this year (3% overall, 21% phase3) I made a graph of phase3 commits per quarter - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/File:Commits.png The second quarter of this year had the fewest commits since Q3 2006. > Certain transparency issues that have been mentioned probably are > related to having an office, but you'll still need to make sound > arguments to support this notion (fortunately, some people have done > this) rather than committing a logical fallacy. You can't just blame > any arbitrary event that occurred in the past 5 years for everything > that's worse now than it was 5 years ago without backing up that > assertion with convincing arguments. > > Roan Kattouw (Catrope) > > [1] These numbers blow my mind every so often: when I started in July > 2007 we were in the r26000s vs. the r72000s today, even though the SVN > history goes back to 2001. -- Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
