Interesting Insights Into Wine's Development

Wine, the widely-known open-source software for running Microsoft Windows programs on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, now weighs in at more than three million lines of code. In this article is some insight into its pace of development, how the CodeWeavers company dominates Wine's development, and other intriguing statistics about this project that's been around for two decades.

Using the fun GitStats utility, the Wine Git repository was analyzed as of this morning (21 January 2013) for this Phoronix report.

First up, here's some general Wine development statistics and information:

- The exposed commit history goes back to 29 June of 1993. During these past 7,146 days, there was development activity about 60% of the time -- on 4,275 of the days.

- Within the Wine Git repository is a total of 6,078 files which total more than three million lines of code (3,034,853 to be exact).

- There's been 93,448 comits, which average out to be just over 21 commits per active day or 13 commits per day. These commits come from 1,371 different authors with an average of 68 commits per author.

The Wine development pace has risen a lot since 1993. However, since around 2008, the commit pace has been slowing down... A possible reason for the peak in 2008 was the release of Wine 1.0.

There were 8,194 commits in 2012, 9,742 commits in 2011, 9,874 commits in 2010, 11,523 commits in 2009, and 11,343 commits commits back in 2008.

With 12,135 commits, Alexandre Julliard is the most prolific author of Wine. However, this isn't a huge surprise considering that Julliard is Wine's project leader and works full-time on Wine through his employment at CodeWeavers. In second with nearly 5,000 commits is Jacek Caban, another CodeWeavers developer and long-time Wine contributor. In third for most commits is Henri Verbeet, a developer active in Wine (also employed by CodeWeavers) and responsible for much of the Direct3D work. For those who might not like the Wine-based CrossOver software since it's not free, you can see from these statistics that CodeWeavers' contributions to upstream Wine remain very significant.

Alexandre Julliard not only dominates Wine when it comes to the sheer commit count, but in terms of lines of code introduced, Alexandre wins by a huge margin.

In 2012 there were 143 active contributors to the Wine Git repository, which is down from 166 the year prior. The most active authors in any given year was back in 2008 with 237.

Yep, CodeWeavers certainly dominates the development of Wine.

Wine's file count has steadily rose since 1993 to now be a collection of more than six thousand files. However, for about the past year, the files count of Wine has rather plateaued.

The line count of Wine continues to rise with no signs of slowing down. There's more than three million lines of code currently making up this widely-used open-source software.