halting problem : Who wrote GTK+ (Reprise)

As I’ve been asked by different people about data from older releases of GTK+, after the previous article on Who Wrote GTK+ 3.18, I ran the git-dm script on every release and generated some more data:

Release	Lines added	Lines removed	Delta	Changesets	Contributors
2.0¹	666495	345348	321147	2503	106
2.2	301943	227762	74181	1026	89
2.4	601707	116402	485305	2118	109
2.6	181478	88050	93428	1421	101
2.8	93734	47609	46125	1155	86
2.10	215734	54757	160977	1614	110
2.12	232831	43172	189659	1966	148
2.14	215151	102888	112263	1952	140
2.16	71335	23272	48063	929	118
2.18	52228	23490	28738	1079	90
2.20	80397	104504	-24107	761	82
2.22	51115	71439	-20324	438	70
2.24	4984	2168	2816	184	37
3.0¹	354665	580207	-225542	4792	115
3.2	227778	168616	59162	2435	98
3.4	126934	83313	43621	2201	84
3.6	206620	34965	171655	1011	89
3.8	84693	34826	49867	1105	90
3.10	143711	204684	-60973	1722	111
3.12	86342	54037	32305	1453	92
3.14	130387	144926	-14539	2553	84
3.16	80321	37037	43284	1725	94
3.18*	78997	54614	24383	1638	83

Here you can see the history of the GTK releases, since 2.0.

These numbers are to be taken with a truckload of salt, especially the ones from the 2.x era. During the early 2.x cycle, releases did not follow the GNOME timed release schedule; instead, they were done whenever needed:

Release	Date
2.0	March 2002
2.2	December 2002
2.4	March 2004
2.6	December 2004
2.8	August 2005
2.10	July 2006
2.12	September 2007
2.14	September 2008
2.16	March 2009
2.18	September 2009
2.20	March 2010
2.22	September 2010
2.24	January 2011

Starting with 2.14, we settled to the same cycle as GNOME, as it made releasing GNOME and packaging GTK+ on your favourite distribution a lot easier.

This disparity in the length of the development cycles explains why the 2.12 and 2.14 cycles, which lasted a year, represent an anomaly in terms of contributors (148 and 140, respectively) and in terms of absolute lines changed.

The reduced activity between 2.20 and 2.24.0 is easily attributable to the fact that people were working hard on the 2.90 branch that would become 3.0.

In general, once you adjust by release time, it’s easy to see that the number of contributors is pretty much stable at around 90:

The average is 94.5, which means we have an hobbit somewhere in the commit log

Another interesting data point would be to look at the ecosystem of companies spawned around GTK+ and GNOME, and how it has changed over the years — but that’s part of a larger discussion that would probably take more than a couple of blog posts to unpack.

I guess the larger point is that GTK+ is definitely not dying; it’s pretty much being worked on by the same amount of people — which includes long timers as well as newcomers — as it was during the 2.x cycle.

Both 2.0 and 3.0 are not wholly accurate; I used, as a starting point for the changeset period, the previous released branch point; for GTK+ 2.0, I started from the GTK_1_3_1 tag, whereas for GTK+ 3.0 I used the 2.90.0 tag. There are commits preceding both tags, but not enough to skew the results. ↩↩

glib gtk development gnome who makes gnome

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