[python-committers] number of active core devs [was: Comments on moving issues to GitHub]

[Brett Cannon]

On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 at 18:08 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> 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 <donald at stufft.io> 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 <ethan at stoneleaf.us> 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~
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>
>
>
> --
> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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