Re: GNOME: numbers of users, patches/revisions

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

On Thu, 2011-03-24 at 15:18 -0400, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
> I'm working on the press release and I'm finding it hard to figure out:
> 
> About how many users can I claim GNOME has?  (To simplify: the desktop, 
> not the platform.)
> 
> "GNOME 3 will reach [number] of users around the world."  What's a 
> reasonable number to predict?

Right now, it is extremely uncertain how many people will end up using
the GNOME 3 desktop. Fedora is the only distro I know of that is
planning to ship it by default. Maybe leave that nugget out? ;)

> How many patches/code changes have been committed since the 2.0 release 
> 9 years ago?  (Tried viewing the repos, can't figure out how to get a 
> total like this.)

What are these metrics intended to indicate? The amount of work that has
gone into GNOME 3? Changes since 2.0 don't necessarily map onto that. I
also suspect it will be way too difficult to pull out the required
numbers for this. You could maybe focus on one or two key modules: lines
of code changed in GNOME Shell since it began, for instance, or the
amount of changes between Gtk+2 and Gtk+3. It's not quite as good, I
know...

Allan
-- 
Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/
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