Visualizing generations in the ASF projects

[rcasero]

Sent by Israel Herraiz to the OSS Watch mailing list:

Hi all,

during my presentation in the workshop last Monday, I showed some
graphs that try to show how different generations of people come in
and go away in an open source project.

I have done that for 33 of the projects that are hosted in the Apache
Software Foundation. The scripts, along with a README file, are
available [1].

The scripts will download the databases from the FLOSSMetrics website,
will dump those databases into MySQL, will run some Python scripts,
and generate Gnuplot scripts and PNG graphs.

So here are the instructions:

* You need: MySQL, bash, Python, Python-MySQLdb, wget, gnuplot
* Download the tarball [1]
* Untar with tar jxvf generations.tar.bz2
* Go to generations/db/
* Run ./fetch_db_files (that will download the databases from FM3, it
may take a little)
* Run ./dump_db_files. You have to pass as arguments the MySQL
options. You need a MySQL user with permissions to create
databases. For instance, if your user is root with password root,
use ./dump_db_files -u root -proot. If it has no password, remove
the -p parameter.
* Go to ../scripts
* Run python run_generations.py. That will store some data files,
Gnuplot scripts and PNG files in /tmp/generations/data. Edit
run_generations.py if you prefer any other directory.
* Have a look at the graphs in /tmp/generations/data, and play with
gnuplot using the *.gnuplot files (pass the filename as the first
argument to gnuplot). The 3D graphs are interactive.
* Discuss about how useless are the graphs ;-)

That will be done for 33 of all the projects hosted in the ASF
(excluding the incubator).

Ross was thinking of somehow adding those graphs to the project pages
in Simal [2]. Actually, that is something that we will do in the
context of FLOSSMetrics. The data website [3] right now does only
contain
databases and little else (like RDF descriptions of the projects, look
for it in the Webdav directories), but it will contain graphs and more
user-friendly things (see some "dry runs" [4][5]) in a near future
(for some definition of "near" ;-) .

Poke me if you find problems trying to run the scrips or visualizing
the data.

Cheers,
Israel

[1] http://gsyc.es/~herraiz/osswatch/generations.tar.bz2
[2] http://simal.oss-watch.ac.uk/
[3] http://data.flossmetrics.org
[4] http://gsyc.es/~lcanas/melquiades-0.3/
[5] http://gsyc.es/~lcanas/melquiades-0.3/project.html