Version Control Visualization and End Point in Open Source
By Steph Skardal
January 3, 2011
Over the weekend, I discovered an open source tool for version control visualization, Gource. I decided to put together a few videos to showcase End Point’s involvement in several open source projects.
Here’s a quick legend to help understand the videos below:
| The branches and nodes correlate to directories and files, respectively. In the case of the image to the left, the repository has a main directory with several files and three directories. One of the child directories has one file and the other two have multiple files. |
| A big dot represents a person, and a flash connecting the person and a file signifies a commit. |
| White + blue dots represent current End Point employees. |
| White + grey dots represent former End Point employees. |
| White dots represent other people, out there! |
The Videos
Interchange from endpoint on Vimeo.
Bucardo from endpoint on Vimeo.
One of the articles that references Gource suggests that the videos can be used to visualize and analyze the community involvement of a project (open source or not). One might also be able to qualitatively analyze the stability of project file architecture from a video, but this won’t reveal anything definitive about the code stability since external factors can influence file structure. For example, since I am intimately familiar with the progress of Spree, I can identify when Spree transitioned to Rails 3 in the video, which required reorganization of the Spree core functionality (read more about this here and here).
In the case of this article, I wanted to highlight End Point’s involvement in a few open source projects where we’ve had various levels of involvement. We’ve contributed to Interchange since 2000. We’ve been involved in Spree less lately, but had more presence in early 2009. In the smaller projects Bucardo and pgsi, End Point employees have worked on a team to be the primary contributors to the projects in addition to a few external contributors. Open source is important to End Point, and it’s great to see our presence demonstrated in these cute videos.
git interchange postgres spree open-source
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