Gource Representation

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 10 September 2010, Thomas Bullock wrote:
> Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2010 21:19:25 +0200
> From: Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be>
> Subject: Development visualization with gource
> To: "gnucash-user at gnucash.org" <gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> Cc: gnucash-devel at gnucash.org
> Message-ID: <201009082119.26281.janssens-geert at telenet.be>
> Content-Type: Text/Plain;  charset="us-ascii"
> 
> Today I felt like doing something else than hunting bugs on the GnuCash
>  code, so I made something prettier:
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7jrct45jdE
> 
> This video is a visual representation of the development of GnuCash since
>  its early beginnings in 1997 up until today.
> 
> 
> Above is a <SNIP>
> 
> Beautiful job, Geert!
> 
> A couple questions:
> 
> a) who is the queen bee at the very start of the demo?  Derek Atkins? 
>  Someone no longer on the project?  Very impressive chain of activities.
> 
No, that's Linas. He's the one that originally started the GnuCash project (I 
believe back then it was called xacc).

What I should as well is that the time doesn't pass linearly in the movie. 
Large gaps of inactivity are just eliminated by gource. So a month with little 
activity will be visualized in a couple of seconds where a very active month 
could take up half a minute.

> b) I assume you did this with the changes to code.  Would doing the same to
>  the documentation be worth showing?
> 
This was indeed done from gnucash' svn trunk. No branches, no tags, no 
documentation, although I believe early on the documentation was in the same 
location, so part of the visualization also shows early documentation 
development. Particularly wildev in the movie has contributed a lot to it.

> c) Due to the plethora of branches spinning off in so many directions it is
>  confusing to understand what is illustrated.  Are some of the small
>  branches now defunct?  Or how are these to be understood and which is the
>  main branch from which we take the stable version?  If that can be
>  detected from the info in the graphic display, my visual was too small to
>  read the numbers and words.  The graphic is a great presentation of what
>  is happening or happened.  A footnote on at least the main  branches would
>  help appreciate the various parts.  Don't know if that would be possible.
> 
What is illustrated is the directory structure of 
https//svn.gnucash.org/repo/gnucash/trunk and the files in those directories. 
Gource has some configuration parameters for the visualization, but it's 
fairly limited in scope. I did for example disable the display of filenames 
for changed files. At times so many files changed at once the visualization 
got lost in a soup of letters and numbers. I chose to only add directory names 
and user names.

If you have trouble reading the numbers and words, you should select a higher 
resolution playback. The movie is available in youtube in 1280x720 format, but 
by default youtube will only display it at 360x?.

> I really like what you created and would like to see that as an ongoing
>  component of GC to help newcomers appreciate where we came from and where
>  we are now.
> 
Possibly. It's at least a representation that is fun to watch. Perhaps we 
should add it somewhere on the GnuCash website, for example as an addition to 
the sizing page which is fairly dry now.

Geert