[Starlingx-discuss] Community activity dashboard

[Thierry Carrez]

Penney, Don wrote:
> To follow up on the discussion on the call this morning...
> 
> Here's one example of "Committer" being used rather than author. Jack Ding had helped with upstreaming a lot of our early commits. The biterg page shows him having 120 commits in config, but he's listed as the author of 6:
> 
> config$ git log --pretty=fuller |grep '^Commit:.*Jack Ding' | wc -l
> 118
> config$ git log --pretty=fuller |grep '^Author:.*Jack Ding' | wc -l
> 6

There are actually *three* different things.

- The overview page tracks the *Gerrit change owner*. As Jeremy says, 
this is what we use to check CLA/DCO for contributions, and what we use 
for electoral rolls as well. So it is our default way to count 
"contribution".

- What you compare above is data from the *git repository commits*, not 
the Gerrit changes. Git commits have two concepts: Committer and Author. 
Bitergia allows to track both (and by default in their Data sources/git 
dashboard show Authors). This data (Git Committer and Author) is more 
unreliable data compared to Gerrit Owners as you potentially inherit 
work done outside you community (in case of upstream merges) and 
duplicate data (in case of repository forks).

So in summary, you can totally track Git Authorship with the Bitergia 
tooling.... and I can add a panel on the Git data source page that will 
make that easier. But I would strongly recommend against using Git 
Authors and for using Gerrit Owners to count basic code contribution, as 
it is a much more reliable metric that happens to match how we use in 
license compliance and governance elections.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)