(Subject modeled upon the "Who wrote 2.6.x" series from LWN)

Hello everyone,
following the implied "suggestion" of David Miller to track reverts in

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=120959059828048&w=2 , I stitched

together a short script that evaluates the commit log summary and prints

a overview who has the most reverts and who got reverted most. There are

surprisingly few revert commits -- currently, perhaps because, as he

says, a "reluctance to even suggest reverts".
One thing I noticed is that reverts are not always marked with the word

"revert" in the summary line even though it normally would be, for

example

	6b8e1c7e x86: 8K stacks by default

	d61ecf0b x86: 4kstacks default

(People evading the revert statistics?)

So that is not counted, but I wanted to make aware of it.

 P#  COMM#  NAME --- Top people doing the revert:

  1      1  Paul Mackerras

  2      1  David S. Miller

  3      1  Ingo Molnar

  4      1  Andrew Morton

  5      1  John W. Linville
 P#  COMM#  NAME --- Top developers with reverted commits:

  1      1  Andreas Schwab

  2      1  Michael Beasley

  3      1  Ingo Molnar

  4      1  Luis Carlos Cobo

  5      1  Yasunori Goto
 P#  COMM#  NAME --- Top people doing the revert:

  1      6  Linus Torvalds

  2      5  Len Brown

  3      4  Andrew Morton

  4      3  Ingo Molnar

  5      2  Paul Mackerras

  6      2  David S. Miller

  7      2  Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz

  *     10 developers with only one revert are omitted
 P#  COMM#  NAME --- Top developers with reverted commits:

  1      2  Matthew Garrett

  2      2  Ingo Molnar

  3      2  Alexey Starikovskiy

  4      2  Christoph Lameter

 P#  COMM#  NAME --- Top people doing the revert:

  1     13  Linus Torvalds

  2      7  Andrew Morton

  3      5  Len Brown

  4      2  Jens Axboe

  5      2  Thomas Gleixner

  6      2  David Woodhouse

  *     11 developers with only one revert are omitted
 P#  COMM#  NAME --- Top developers with reverted commits:

  1      2  In...
[ message continues ]

But what exactly those numbers mean?
A big number of reverts can mean that a developer usually submits unstable

stuff. But it can also mean that a developer cares so much about stability

that he'd rather revert, fix it and try to merge it in the next development

cycle. The "bad" maintainer that submits unstable stuff may try to fix

the reported bug instead of reverting it (but he won't fix the other

undiscovered bugs that are still there because the code was not tested

well enought)
I don't think those numbers are very useful. Even the "number of bug reports

filed against the code of a given developer" is not considered meaningful as

measurement of good programming.

--

IMO the summary line of a fix should tell what is being fixed.  The

changelog can then go on to explain how the fix works.  For example, by

reverting all or parts of a previous commit.

--

Stefan Richter

-=====-==--- -=-= ---=-

http://arcgraph.de/sr/

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