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Author Topic: Number of developers  (Read 1561 times)

pathfinder

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Number of developers
« on: April 13, 2021, 01:57:43 am »
This didn't seem to fit in either the Lazarus or Free Pascal sections since it touches on both, hence general.

I am wondering if anyone has a count of the number of Lazarus and Free Pascal developers?

Mainly out of curiosity since I've read that both Pharo (Squeak Smalltalk fork) and Racket (grew out of PLT Scheme) both have around 80 developers who contribute. Although I can't find where I previously found those numbers.

dbannon

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #1 on: April 13, 2021, 02:17:20 am »
Like any open source project, depends on who you want to count, people who are now actively contributing or people who where there in the early days but have passed on (or away!).

You could count the number of committers listed under https://github.com/graemeg/lazarus/commits/upstream

:-)

Davo

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speter

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #2 on: April 13, 2021, 02:22:29 am »
I can't see anyway to work out the number of active Laz/FPC developers.

If you had access to the downloads data, you could maybe generate a number, but how far back would you go? For example, how many people downloaded Laz 5 years ago and a still using that version? Maybe you could simply base a number on unique IP addresses used to download the current latest version...!?

If you had access to forum stats you would generate a number based on active members; but that might ignore people who "lurk" (read but don't post). I note on the "stats" panel of the forum (at present), it lists "Users:13; Guests: 221". Are those guests developers or bored housewives - maybe they are both ;).

Maybe the _best_ way would be to send "everyone" an email, inviting them to complete a survey about their current "life" activities, and include a question asking them whether they do any programming and if so whether they use Laz....

cheers
S.
I climbed mighty mountains, and saw that they were actually tiny foothills. :)

speter

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #3 on: April 13, 2021, 02:26:36 am »
. . . has a count of the number of Lazarus and Free Pascal developers?
Do you mean the number of people involved in developing / maintaining Lazarus & FPC? This number _may_ be knowable.
Or do you mean the number of people using those products?

cheers
S.
I climbed mighty mountains, and saw that they were actually tiny foothills. :)

Gustavo 'Gus' Carreno

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #4 on: April 13, 2021, 02:31:00 am »
Hey SPeter,

I can be horribly wrong, but what you're describing is how to assess the number of users as in, the amount of people that use Lazarus+FPC.

In my mind, developers are the ones that not only use, but also have commit privileges(and commit frequently) on the SVN server where the code resides.

The first is quite hard to calculate, the second is a matter of grabbing some logs from the SVN server.
OR, like @dbannon said, count the committers on the GIT copy.

Cheers,
Gus

EDIT: Sorry SPeter, I guess you were quicker that I was :)
« Last Edit: April 13, 2021, 02:38:39 am by Gustavo 'Gus' Carreno »
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dbannon

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #5 on: April 13, 2021, 02:39:07 am »
Hmm, I am still answering assuming he means number of developers who develop FPC/Lazarus, and still only addressing Lazarus.

Open Lazarus IDE, Help->About->Contributors

If you mean the number who actually use FPC/Lazarus, wow ?  Forum has 20K members, but many users won't join the forum, you see posts about FPC on stacktrace etc.  As speter said, unknowable.
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PierceNg

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #6 on: April 13, 2021, 02:45:25 am »
This didn't seem to fit in either the Lazarus or Free Pascal sections since it touches on both, hence general.

I am wondering if anyone has a count of the number of Lazarus and Free Pascal developers?

Mainly out of curiosity since I've read that both Pharo (Squeak Smalltalk fork) and Racket (grew out of PLT Scheme) both have around 80 developers who contribute. Although I can't find where I previously found those numbers.

For Pharo, all contributors to the current Pharo 8.0 release are named on the release page: https://www.pharo.org/news/pharo8.0-released. Pharo is developed on Github so the people who've had PRs accepted are also listed on the Github page. Above does not count the developers of / contributors to OpenSmalltalk VM, one of two virtual machine implementations for Pharo.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2021, 02:47:13 am by PierceNg »

pathfinder

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #7 on: April 13, 2021, 02:57:23 am »
The number who actually have commit to either Lazarus and/or FPC, not the number of those using them for either commercial or personal development.

Pharo's Github may have been where I got that number, but I also seem to recall it being mentioned in the mailing list at one time.

Lazarus > Help > About > Contributors is fairly lengthy.

I understand people come and go.  Someone may have been a committer from say, 2002-2006, but no longer do. It was mainly out of curiosity if there was a way to find an approximate number of active or recent committers.
« Last Edit: April 13, 2021, 03:06:20 am by pathfinder »

Martin_fr

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #8 on: April 13, 2021, 02:59:38 am »
developers who contribute.

Maybe terminology matters.

There are 2 kind of contributors.
1) People who are part of the core team (of either FPC or Lazarus). Those people can themself commit to the SVN.
2) People who contribute (contribution range from small changes, to entire new features)

Within the Lazarus/FPC community the former (1) are often called: Developers.
The latter: Contributors.

Developers  can be found by getting an svn log, and extract the committer, then "sort | uniq -c".
If you want to filter by "recent active", then restrict the log to the time frame of interest.

Contributors for Lazarus are listed in the IDE, and the file docs/contributors.
However there is no easy way to distinguish between, the size of those contributions.

----
The Lazarus git mirror lists over 40 names that committed. Not all of them are currently active. (I would guess maybe half of them)

pathfinder

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #9 on: April 13, 2021, 03:09:19 am »
Thanks everyone!

PascalDragon

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #10 on: April 13, 2021, 09:10:37 am »
This didn't seem to fit in either the Lazarus or Free Pascal sections since it touches on both, hence general.

I am wondering if anyone has a count of the number of Lazarus and Free Pascal developers?

One can take a nice look at the direct contributors for FPC here and for Lazarus here.

There are more people that contribute indirectly through patches (both small and big patches).

Gustavo 'Gus' Carreno

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #11 on: April 13, 2021, 09:34:54 am »
Hey PascalDragon,

One can take a nice look at the direct contributors for FPC here and for Lazarus here.

Those stats are awesome!! Thank you very much.
But I think something went wrong around a year ago, since all data collection seems to have stopped. Odd.

Cheers,
Gus
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six1

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #12 on: April 13, 2021, 09:45:36 am »
... Lazarus here.


There is "jesus" on the list...
So i think, Lazarus is the one and only IDE to use

 :D :D :D

marcov

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Re: Number of developers
« Reply #13 on: April 13, 2021, 09:50:34 am »

One can take a nice look at the direct contributors for FPC here and for Lazarus here.

Warns that it is an year old, and of course it only counts contributions to trunk, not to fixes branches, docs and fpcbuild

 

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