Author Topic: What are Github commits?  (Read 5836 times)

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Offline Gentso1

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Please understand I get that its not just about commits. I am trying to get my own personal set of metrics.

With devs coming onto the forum needing to have delegates elected I think its important for shareholders to be at least somewhat educated on who is doing what and how often.

I think I have a basic understanding of commits now.

Any suggestions of what other holders like myself can use to help to gauge what  coder is doing. I know this is a tough question, I am just looking for some guidelines.


Security of shares and education of holders is the first step to a greater voter participation imho.

Offline gamey

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Even if you get past commits and into # of code line changes it would be something of an improvement.  However, you would be skipping over people who might not be coding and instead tracking down hard to find bugs.  Debugging obscure bugs is the type of thing that can take a week and lead to 1 line of code change.  It is a job that is just as key as writing the code itself, arguably more key.

So.. please don't read too much into commits.
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Offline Thom

More specifically, frequency of commits gives you an idea of whether someone is actively working on something or not.  No commits means they are not writing code.

In theory a developer should commit their work on a daily basis even if it is incomplete.  In practice any developer that goes weeks between commits is likely doing something else other than coding.

The specific definition for a github (or other source code management systems) commit is: A "commit" is the action performed by a developer to contribute or commit code to the source repository. As toast says it is only a rough gauge of activity. A simple spelling error in a code comment could be fixed and committed and that increments the version / commit number, tho it had zero effect on the functionality of the code.

To somewhat counter to BM's first sentence, it is possible a developer is actually doing coding work but hasn't checked in (committed) changes yet. As BM went on to explain, following good coding practices would mean regular commits, generally a minimum of once per day. However, there are a number of reasons the frequency might legitimately less than once per day. It really depends on the urgency of the changes, whether the programmer might be doing work while on the road or whether the code is for a brand new feature and has no other dependencies and is a prototype / work in progress / experiment.

The point is there are exceptions to the a daily commit schedule. In general it should be done quite often. It reduces the risk of loosing changes and provides a very important control point, especially where many developers are working on the same project. When it comes to open source projects like BitShares it's important to keep everyone syncronized and on the same page so to speak.
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Offline bytemaster

More specifically, frequency of commits gives you an idea of whether someone is actively working on something or not.  No commits means they are not writing code.

In theory a developer should commit their work on a daily basis even if it is incomplete.  In practice any developer that goes weeks between commits is likely doing something else other than coding. 
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Offline toast

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In theory a commit is the smallest unit of code change.

Commits are as bad of a metric as lines of code. They give you a very rough sense of activity, but rewarding based on either will lead to badly broken incentives.
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Offline Gentso1

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If you google the above term it gives you answers based on you trying to learn to use github.

I have no interest in that. I am trying to get a working understanding of what commits actually are and more importantly if we as users/shareholders can use them as some sort of metric.I would ideally

like to be able to have a rough gauge of what devs are working on and how often. I can see part of this (I think) by looking at the branch the commit is going to.

With Dev's now having to come onto the forum and make a case for their delegates this could make their job easier if folks like me understand Github.

Any thoughts or ideas on bridging the Dev/shareholder divide would be greatly appreciated.