1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
|
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<link rev="made" href="mailto:esr@snark.thyrsus.com" />
<meta name="description"
content="Fetchmail participation statistics" />
<meta name="keywords" content="fetchmail, growth, analysis" />
<title>Trends in the fetchmail project's growth</title>
<style type="text/css">
/*<![CDATA[*/
span.c6 {color: brown}
span.c5 {color: red}
span.c4 {color: lime}
span.c3 {color: blue}
div.c2 {text-align: center}
h1.c1 {text-align: center}
/*]]>*/
</style>
</head>
<body>
<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page header">
<tr>
<td width="30%">Back to <a href="/~esr">Eric's Home Page</a></td>
<td width="30%" align="center">Up to <a href="/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a></td>
<td width="30%" align="right">$Date: 2002/09/09 07:24:37 $</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr />
<h1 class="c1">Trends in the fetchmail project's growth</h1>
<p>The scattergram below was made with Gnuplot 3.7 from data pulled
directly out of the project NEWS file using two custom
shellscripts, <a href="timeseries">timeseries</a> and <a
href="growthplot">growthplot</a>. If you see a broken-image icon,
upgrade to a <a
href="http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html">browser that can
view PNGs</a>.</p>
<div class="c2"><img src="growth.png"
alt="Fetchmail trends graph" /></div>
<p>The graph shows the population growth of the fetchmail project.
The horizontal scale is days since baseline, which is when I
started collecting statistics in October 1996 at version 1.9.0.
Left vertical scale is number of participants. There is one data
point for each release; therefore, the changes in density of marks
indicate release frequency.</p>
<p>The peak in the earliest part of the graph (before the note "Bad
addresses dropped") seems to be an artifact; I was not regularly
dropping addresses that became invalid at the time. Turnover on the
list seems to be about 5% per month (but that's just my estimate, I
don't have numbers on this).</p>
<p>The <span class="c3">blue scatter of squares</span> is total
participants. The <span class="c4">green scatter of crosses</span>
is the count of people on fetchmail-friends after I split the list.
The <span class="c5">cyan scatter of diamonds</span> is the
population of fetchmail-announce after the split.</p>
<p>The <span class="c6">brown scatter of diamonds</span> tracks
project size in lines of code (right vertical axis). The scale
relationship between this scatter and the other three is
arbitrary.</p>
<p>This graph is quite revealing. Several trends stand out:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Over time, the project population displays rather consistent
linear growth.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The key event in the project's lifetime was release 4.3.0 in
October 1997, when I declared the code to be out of development and
in maintainance mode, and split the fetchmail list.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The run-up to 4.3.0 saw the most intensive spate of releases in
the project's history (the gap in that run happened when I took a
two-week vacation). It was followed by a significant slowdown.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>After 4.3.0, the developer population remained fairly stable
around an average of about 250 participants.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Essentially all population growth after 4.3.0 happened on the
announce list, among people using fetchmail but not active
co-developers.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The growth trend in code size looks sublinear, perhaps
logarithmic.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The linear growth trend in population is particularly
interesting; a priori we might expect geometric or logistic growth,
given that the project spreads by word of mouth.</p>
<p>It has been suggested that the linear growth rate is the result
of a situation in which both number of projects and the population
of eligible programmers are rising on trend curves of the same
(probably exponential) rate.</p>
<p>There are some other pages doing similar things:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><a href="http://kitenet.net/programs/debhelper/stats/">Here</a>
are growth statistics on the debhelper packaging utility.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><a href="http://durak.org:81/sean/pubs/kfc/">Here</a> is a page
on the vocabulary of the Linux kernel.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page header">
<tr>
<td width="30%">Back to <a href="/~esr">Eric's Home Page</a></td>
<td width="30%" align="center">Up to <a href="/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a></td>
<td width="30%" align="right">$Date: 2002/09/09 07:24:37 $</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br clear="left" />
<address>Eric S. Raymond <a
href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></a></address>
</body>
</html>
|
