Yesterday I noticed that my commit count in ohloh.net has reached 3500 commits. It is the amount of commits I’ve done to public Open Source repositories that ohloh.net tracks. It took about six years.
Now, that number is something one can proud of and it is public record. It is not the whole truth however. I don’t have easy way to prove it but I think my real commit count is over 4000. The reason? Ohloh.net tracks only commits to SVN trunk. So all branch commits are missing. We have sevenrelease branches in WinMerge and every release branch easily gets fifty or more commits by me. So 500 commits to branches sounds realistic. But as the 3500 is easy to prove and clearly visible it is better number to use.
Another unfair point with this number is that all commits are not for my work. I’ve just committed lots of work done by others. Translation updates are one example where I just commit work of others. I always give the credit in commit log (and in contributors listings) but again there is no easy way to tell how many my own patches I’ve committed. However, I do some work for every commit. I build, test, review etc. So I think it is fair to say all these commits are my work too.
How about this another number, six years? When I contributed first patches for WinMerge I merely did it so that I could give back something. I never intended to become a regular developer. Indeed I did not even care if my patches were accepted or not. Of course it was nice they got accepted quickly. And the last thing I needed back then was taking responsibility from a software like WinMerge. I was using some Open Source software but knew very little about development models, tools and so on. It was totally new world and development model for me.
All that learning has been the best side of all this Open Source work. You must learn something new almost every day. It has been a big benefit in my day work too. Many times I’ve noticed at work that I already know the tools and libraries I need to use.
Everything I do is public. Every good idea and clever piece of code (when I some day write one…). But errors too! It is not nice when people see all errors and mistakes. There is no way to hide anything once it gets added to public repository. It was a bit shocking at first. Sometimes it is quite embarassing to find out that bug is caused by my own commit couple of years earlier. But I’ve never really seen finger pointing in WinMerge. Its not important who did it (error). It is important we fix it. This is one thing I really like in current development team.
It has been a fun six years with WinMerge. And although I need small breaks now and then I’ve no plans to stop contributing. There is so much work to do. WinMerge is good, but it could be so much better… For Frhed there are lot more serious alternatives, but I think it has its own good sides. Maybe it won’t be the best free hexaeditor but it will be one good hexeditor with some unique features.
