Git by a bus.

David Gay pointed me to an interesting project called Git by a Bus. Git by a Bus analyzes your git repository and attempts to quantify risk of having lots of code knowledge tied up in only a few people. Git by a Bus does its analysis by going through the repo history and making an estimate of what it calls unique knowledge.

This project blog page describes the analysis and metrics used. Perhaps this is a useful way to show how Fedora is doing as a project, across repositories like our web applications and infrastructure. It might show where we need to encourage further community development and participation so we avoid the “eaten by raptors” problem.

You might recall that “eaten by raptors” is Fedora shorthand for “hit by a bus” (violent idiom) or “going to work for another company” (not always applicable to Fedora, although certainly to Red Hat as a major contributor). We try to solve this problem by spreading project knowledge and documenting our processes. That way, if someone was eaten by velociraptors, the project can keep going without too much of a disturbance. This problem is common to any team or enterprise, not just open source. But I like to think our velociraptor spin is unique.

Here’s an example output I prepared for the MirrorManager project, which we use to provide content to Fedora mirrors worldwide. This is a potential example of high risk. One developer (the inimitable and awesome Matt Domsch) has unique knowledge of this project that is at risk if velociraptors manage to track and eat him. No doubt Matt would put up a good fight, but as you probably know they are clever girls.

Thankfully, there is a MirrorManager related Fedora Activity Day happening later this year. During that time the Fedora infrastructure, release engineering, and applications teams hope to accumulate and document more MM-related knowledge. At the same time they’ll be using this knowledge to architect, plan, and further develop the next revision of MirrorManager.

If you’re a principal in an FOSS project using git for your code, you might find Git by a Bus useful.