It is the start of a new year, and with that brings the start of a new quarter, which means it is time for a contribution statistics update from us. I have lots of interesting data to walk you through this time, so let’s get started.
Year On Year Comparison
A good place to start would be to compare the previous year gone by with last year to see how we did. This table shows the number of organisations, contributors and commits to MariaDB Server in the last few years. The “Non-MariaDB” lines are contributors and commits by people who are not employed by MariaDB Plc or MariaDB Foundation.
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organisations | 26 | 20 | 26 |
| Contributors | 104 | 112 | 97 |
| Commits | 2547 | 2201 | 2133 |
| Contributors Non-MariaDB | 57 | 68 | 58 |
| Commits Non-MariaDB | 228 | 206 | 229 |
The numbers indicate that the number of commits appears to be decreasing, and the number of contributors, particularly from the MariaDB organisations, has decreased slightly. But the number of commits from Non-MariaDB contributors has increased. It is difficult to read much into this because 2023 was a tough year in MariaDB’s history, even if it ended in a good position.
Project Tracking
Now that we have the breakdown of MariaDB Server, let’s look at the 2023 statistics for all projects which are tracked.
| Project | Contributors MariaDB | Commits MariaDB | Contributors Other | Commits Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MariaDB Server | 39 | 1904 | 58 | 229 |
| libmarias3 | 4 | 7 | 1 | 1 |
| MariaDB ColumnStore Engine | 16 | 285 | 7 | 12 |
| MariaDB Docker | 3 | 89 | 4 | 11 |
| MariaDB Jupyter Kernel | 2 | 12 | 2 | 4 |
| MariaDB Connector/C | 9 | 103 | 3 | 6 |
One of the main interesting changes here from last quarter is there are now external contributions for Connector/C. This is great to see, and I hope there are more of this in the future.
New Contributors
I like welcoming new contributors to the MariaDB sphere, and this time around I have a couple to mention:
- Libing Song from Alibaba has had one patch merged in this stats release and two more that are close to being merged. Look out for more from Alibaba in the future.
- Anthony Ryan from Whatbox with a nice bugfix for
mariadb-upgrade.
There are definitely more too. Currently, there isn’t a statistic filter to figure out new contributors, this is something I should maybe work on in the future. For now, it is more of a difficult manual task.
In addition, Sergei Glushchenko from Percona shows in the statistics. This is an interesting entry because it is a bug fix created for Percona Server that was cherry-picked by Daniel Black into MariaDB Server. It fixed a bug in a variable in MariaBackup, which is forked from XtraBackup. XtraBackup also had the bug and Sergei had subsequently fixed it. Sergei was not involved in this happening, but we try to maintain credit for code where possible.
MariaDB Server Deeper Dive
Now let’s take a deeper dive into the statistics of MariaDB Server in 2023.
| Category | Entity | Contributors | Commits | Lines Added | Lines Removed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MRDB | MariaDB Plc. | 31 | 1688 | 342164 | 202124 |
| MRDF | MariaDB Foundation | 8 | 216 | 11251 | 7804 |
| Provider | Codership | 5 | 71 | 10211 | 1840 |
| Sponsor | Amazon | 15 | 46 | 7929 | 5155 |
| GSoC | GSoC | 1 | 2 | 13158 | 3903 |
| Distro | All Distros | 5 | 7 | 72 | 19 |
| Other | Others | 32 | 104 | 22578 | 1586 |
| TOTAL | 97 | 2133 | 407337 | 222424 |
We had a nice growth since the previous quarter statistics, 9 more contributors and nearly 584 more commits. Nearly 12% of those commits came from outside of MariaDB Plc. and MariaDB Foundation.
Pull Requests
The pull request counts are more interesting than normal this time around. Let’s have a look at the raw numbers. The columns are:
- New PRs: The number of PRs that have been opened that week.
- Draft PRs: Of the newly opened PRs that week, how many are currently drafts.
- Closed PRs: The number of PRs that have been closed that week (not merged).
- Merged PRs: The number of PRs that have been merged that week.
- Total PRs: The total number of PRs we have had up to the end of that week.
- Still Open PRs: The total number of PRs still open (including draft) at the end of that week.
- Days to First Response: The average number of days to first meaningful response of PRs for PRs that have been responded, for the PRs opened that week.
- New PRs Responded: The total number of PRs that have had a meaningful response that have been opened that week.
- PRs Self Merge No Review: The number of PRs opened that week which have been merged by the author with no review from anyone else in the MariaDB team.
- PRs Self Closed No Review: The number of PRs opened that week which have had no meaningful response and have been closed by the author.
| Week Ending | New PRs | Draft PRs | Closed PRs | Merged PRs | Total PRs | Still Open PRs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-10-01 | 5 | 0 | 6 | 1 | 2764 | 153 |
| 2023-10-08 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 3 | 2769 | 153 |
| 2023-10-15 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 2776 | 156 |
| 2023-10-22 | 10 | 0 | 1 | 7 | 2786 | 158 |
| 2023-10-29 | 11 | 0 | 6 | 5 | 2797 | 158 |
| 2023-11-05 | 9 | 0 | 2 | 8 | 2806 | 157 |
| 2023-11-12 | 15 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 2821 | 168 |
| 2023-11-19 | 23 | 0 | 2 | 16 | 2844 | 173 |
| 2023-11-26 | 11 | 0 | 3 | 9 | 2855 | 172 |
| 2023-12-03 | 26 | 0 | 9 | 15 | 2881 | 174 |
| 2023-12-10 | 23 | 0 | 3 | 10 | 2904 | 184 |
| 2023-12-17 | 24 | 0 | 4 | 17 | 2928 | 187 |
| 2023-12-24 | 26 | 1 | 14 | 8 | 2954 | 191 |
| Week Ending | Days to First Response | New PRs Responded | New PRs Not Responded | PRs Self Merged No Review | PRs Self Closed No Review |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023-10-01 | 15 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023-10-08 | 36.8 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023-10-15 | 0 | 5 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| 2023-10-22 | 7.8 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023-10-29 | 14.3 | 10 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023-11-05 | 6.6 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023-11-12 | 3 | 13 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2023-11-19 | 6.4 | 18 | 5 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023-11-26 | 5.9 | 10 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| 2023-12-03 | 1.9 | 20 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2023-12-10 | 1.9 | 17 | 5 | 1 | 0 |
| 2023-12-17 | 1.7 | 19 | 4 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023-12-24 | 2.9 | 20 | 4 | 1 | 0 |
The interesting part started happening in November, we started to get a much higher than average number of pull requests, pretty much consistently. When going through these PRs, it seems the cause is MariaDB Plc. developers are increasingly using pull requests. That is great news! Unfortunately, it does mean the number of open pull requests has spiked significantly. We need to tackle this in 2024.
Oldest PRs report
As with last time, I’ll include the report for the 5 PRs which have been waiting for a response or some form of action the longest.
Unfortunately, not a huge change here from last time, the previous #2 spot received some activity so left this list and everything else shifted up one.
Next Time
If there are any additions you would like to see, please let us know. Otherwise, I’ll be back in April with even more metrics!
Featured image: Numbers by morebyless, used under a CC-BY-2.0 license