Leo History, the early years

[Matt Wilkie]

Hi Folks,

The open source GRASS GIS project turned 30 years old this week. Part of the birthday celebrations was the release of a time-lapse video visualisation of the code commit history for the last fourteen years or so. Naturally the graph viz got me thinking of how Leo might some day in the distant future be able to drive something like that, interactively, which in turn got me thinking about the history and story of Leo itself.

The Launchpad code repository goes back to early 2008, but clearly Leo was already in full stride by then. The Leo History page tells us it was conceived in 1996, went through a couple of incubation forms, and hatched into the world December 17, 2001. (huh, how about that, the same month my eldest child was born :).   Does anyone have a handy version-control-with-history copy of Leo for the 7 year leap betwixt 2001 and 2008?

It might be fun and interesting to build a continuous changelog or timeline. I don't think I'd get anything like what Grass achieved, but I'd like to experiment anyway.

cheers,

-matt

[Edward K. Ream]

On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 6:18 PM, Matt Wilkie <map...@gmail.com> wrote:

 

It might be fun and interesting to build a continuous changelog or timeline. I don't think I'd get anything like what Grass achieved, but I'd like to experiment anyway.

​It might be interesting.  I'd like to finish the "everything developers need to know" docs asap.

Edward

[Matt Wilkie]

while it's not a visualisation like I was contemplating, it's still darn interesting, more so perhaps because it's interactive and inspires digging and exploration: https://www.ohloh.net/p/leo

In a Nutshell, The Leo Editor...

• ... has had 8,373 commits made by 35 contributors
  
  representing 246,619 lines of code
• ...is mostly written in Python
  
  with an average number of source code comments
• ... has a well established, mature codebase
  
  maintained by a large development team
  with decreasing Y-O-Y commits
• ...took an estimated 64 years of effort (COCOMO model)
  
  starting with its first commit in February, 2008
  ending with its most recent commit 3 days ago

...and this is missing the earlier years, from 2001 to 2008, before moving to bazaar and Launchpad.

No matter which way I look at it, Leo is a significant body of work and an impressive achievement. Well done Edward -- and Ville and Terry and Jake and ..., and all those who contributed in substantial ways which aren't captured by measuring source code commits!


-matt

[Jacob Peck]

On 8/7/2013 12:44 PM, Matt Wilkie wrote:

while it's not a visualisation like I was contemplating, it's still darn interesting, more so perhaps because it's interactive and inspires digging and exploration: https://www.ohloh.net/p/leo

In a Nutshell, The Leo Editor...

• ... has had 8,373 commits made by 35 contributors
  
  representing 246,619 lines of code
• ...is mostly written in Python
  
  with an average number of source code comments
• ... has a well established, mature codebase
  
  maintained by a large development team
  with decreasing Y-O-Y commits
• ...took an estimated 64 years of effort (COCOMO model)
  
  starting with its first commit in February, 2008
  ending with its most recent commit 3 days ago

...and this is missing the earlier years, from 2001 to 2008, before moving to bazaar and Launchpad.

This is very interesting.  I like this very much.

No matter which way I look at it, Leo is a significant body of work and an impressive achievement. Well done Edward -- and Ville and Terry and Jake and ..., and all those who contributed in substantial ways which aren't captured by measuring source code commits!

Aw shucks, I've barely done anything!  Hope to add more over the next few years (decades?) though.  Leo is my lifeblood at this point. :p

-matt
--

Thanks for the effort putting this together, Matt!  It's an interesting look at the project.

-->Jake

[Edward K. Ream]

On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 11:44 AM, Matt Wilkie <map...@gmail.com> wrote:

In a Nutshell, The Leo Editor...

​Thanks for this summary.  It's also missing almost 10 years of work in C and C++ in earlier versions.

Edward

[Matt Wilkie]

Thanks for the effort putting this together, Matt!  It's an interesting look at the project.

It's nice when something I've done for my own edification works for someone else too. :)

I've located the early years CVS (Concurrent Version System) repository and added that to the Ohloh entry. I don't know if it's smart enough to chain the two timelines together or what. After 30min or so of processing it's at "Step 1 of 3: Downloading source code history (Running 123/4256)", so I expect there won't be anything to look at until later today or tomorrow.

-matt

[Matt Wilkie]

I've located the early years CVS (Concurrent Version System) repository and added that to the Ohloh entry.

which has now been processed and is providing statistics, bringing it up to 12,628 commits made by 43 contributors. representing 499,866 lines of code over a span of 11 years.

This narrows the remaining no-data gap in the open source incarnation of Leo to 2 years (2006-2008). What source code management system was being used during these years? is it still available somewhere?

-matt

[Edward K. Ream]

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 2:15 PM, Matt Wilkie <map...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've located the early years CVS (Concurrent Version System) repository and added that to the Ohloh entry.

​Thanks.​

 

This narrows the remaining no-data gap in the open source incarnation of Leo to 2 years (2006-2008). What source code management system was being used during these years? is it still available somewhere?

​I think it was tigris svn.

EKR

[Ville M. Vainio]

Thought: if we ever move to git, it would be good to collect all the history we have to the repo.

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[Matt Wilkie]

Thought: if we ever move to git, it would be good to collect all the history we have to the repo.

I've imported the Sourceforge CVS to Launchpad, and will do the same for tigris svn if it's still up somewhere.

https://code.launchpad.net/~maphew/leo-editor/cvs-2002-2006
(my, my. "butshell" ? tired fingers!)

later: I found source code for Leo on tigris, http://leo.tigris.org/source/browse/leo/. It's CVS not SVN, but does seem to cover the right time period.


-matt

[Matt Wilkie]

I belatedly remembered that Launchpad has a built in facility for importing code and history from other sites, so I'll use that for the years 2006-2008 on Tigris.org instead:

https://code.launchpad.net/~maphew/leo-editor/cvs-2006-2008

Edward, should you get one, please feel free to ignore a message from me requesting wiki-edit privileges for Leo on Tigris. I mistakenly sent that when I was hunting for how to access cvs/svn.

-matt

[Matt Wilkie]

Ok, I think I've fed Ohloh a seamless history of Leo now, from 2002 to present. This brings the summary to: In a Nutshell, The Leo Editor...

• ... has had 15,508 commits made by 47 contributors
  
  representing 1,064,650 lines of code

• ...is mostly written in Python
  
  with an average number of source code comments

• ...has a well established, mature codebase
  

• maintained by a large development team
  with decreasing Y-O-Y commits

• ...took an estimated 292 years of effort (COCOMO model)
  
  starting with its first commit in February, 2002
  ending with its most recent commit 2 days ago

I don't know much about Ohloh or how reliable the numbers are, there are at least half a dozen double-counts of Contributors for example, but even taken with a brick of salt, it's clear there is a ton of work here.

-matt

[Edward K. Ream]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 5:05 AM, Matt Wilkie <map...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, I think I've fed Ohloh a seamless history of Leo now, from 2002 to present. This brings the summary to: In a Nutshell, The Leo Editor...

• ​​
  ... has had 15,508 commits made by 47 contributors
  
  representing 1,064,650 lines of code
...is mostly written in Python

with an average number of source code comments
• ...has a well established, mature codebase
  
  maintained by a large development team
  with decreasing Y-O-Y commits
• ...took an estimated 292 years of effort (COCOMO model)
  
  starting with its first commit in February, 2002
  ending with its most recent commit 2 days ago

​Thanks for this work, Matt.

Edward