Mesa's Rate Of Git Development Is Slowing

Based upon the latest Git statistics, the rate of Mesa's development commits has been slowing down. There's also some other interesting numbers to share.

This morning I was using GitStats on Mesa. It's been a few years since looking at the top contributors to Mesa so I found it time to look again to see how the development pace and contributor list has changed. As well, I was looking through the commit list of Mesa and other key projects to find any other active independent contributors that have been off my radar but good possible recruits for working at Valve Software on Linux. We're also now more than half-way through 2012, so it's interesting to look at how Mesa's been developing for the first half of the year.

The reporting period for these results begin on 14 February 1998, spanning 5,242 days with commits happening on 3,803 of those days. As of today there are 4,278 files in the Mesa repository that amount to 474,973 lines of code. There have been a total of 51,158 commits from 471 developers.

One of the somewhat surprising graphs was in terms of Mesa's commits per year.

With Mesa continuing to advance and play catch-up with the proprietary graphics drivers in terms of features and performance, one would think that Mesa is still being developed very quickly. On a raw commit basis, Mesa in 2012 isn't actually at a high-point but is trending lower. As of this morning there's been 2,580 Git commits to Mesa master for this calendar year. For 2011 there was 6,752, 12,268 in 2010, and 9,228 in 2009. If simply doubling the number of commits so far this year to get a rough estimate for 2012, that would be about 5,200 commits for the year -- that would be the lowest number of commits in a year to Mesa since 2007 when it was at 4,413 and in 2008 then jumped to 6,592. This would also be less than half of the number of commits that were witnessed in 2010.

The raw number of commits though isn't too revealing but still has some weight. 2010 being a high point for Mesa development isn't entirely surprising since that's when the Radeon and Nouveau Gallium3D drivers were really starting to come together, various Gallium3D state trackers emerging, Intel making much progress with their driver, etc.

When looking at the work to Mesa by the month this year, January saw 759 commits, it dropped to 452 commits in February, 299 commits in March, 442 commits in April, 428 commits in May, and 200 commits so far in June.

Throughout all of Mesa's development going back to 1998, January seems to be always a good month for development while the rate of commits slows during June and July.

Brian Paul remains the most prolific Mesa contributor of all time. This isn't too surprising since he was the original developer of the Mesa3D library and remains a contributor via his work at VMware. Behind Brian is Eric Anholt, Jose Fonseca, Keith Whitwell, Ian Romanick, Marek Olsak, Vinson Lee, David Airlie, and Chia-I Wu.

As another possible sign of development slowing a bit (or at least not drawing in much blood) when it comes to Git statistics is the number of developers contributing. So far this year there's been 103 different people that have committed to the Mesa Git code-base. This is in comparison to 166 different individuals in 2011, 161 different people in 2010, or even 119 in 2009. We'll see if this number of developers changes vastly by year's end.