There’s an interesting article on LWN.net about Gentoo: Who made Gentoo Linux, and when? A commit analysis

I was wondering how Debian compared, so I made some stats using the debian-devel-changes archives.

First, the number of source uploads per quarter:

It’s interesting to note that, while the number of packages in Debian increased a lot, the number of uploads basically stayed the same since 2001.

Then, I wondered about the number of active developers in Debian. So I counted:

• The number of different email addresses in Changed-by
• The number of different keys used to sign uploads

• The number of active devs has been slightly decreasing over the past years.
• The difference between the number of different changed-bys and the number of different keys should be the number of sponsorees, if I understand everything correctly. It is increasing a lot, which probably means that we have a bandwidth problem at integrating new contributors. Hopefully the DM GR will help at reducing that gap.

I can provide the raw data on demand, if someone else want to work on this. There’s probably a lot of other interesting things to do!