Your Emacs Statistics Service

I’ve been plugging away at the Emacs bug database the last month or so. I’m the kind of person who gets obsessed with something for a time and then I do something completely different the next month. So I’m away from Emacs developments for months on end (and this time it’s basically been a couple of years Due To Circumstances), but when I’m back and hacking away, I’m always wondering:

Are things getting better or are things getting worse?

Things are the same! The chart showing the number of open Emacs bugs has been remarkably flat over the last three years; three cheers for the Emacs maintainers and all their helpers!

But is this because there’s fewer bugs reported?

Hm… No, that red line (opened bugs) is almost a straight line, so it’s about fixing things and closing bug reports at a steady pace. (Interactive charts here.)

So let’s look at the number of commits and contributors:

Surprisingly enough the number of commits per month hasn’t been very large; about 300 per month. (The red line is when Emacs moved to git from bzr.) Or perhaps that’s not surprising; the fewer commits, the fewer new bugs?

In a longer perspective:

And here are the equivalent charts for the number of contributors:

Pretty steady at about 35 per month. (The recent spike is just me spelunking through the bugs database and applying a bunch of older patches that were submitted and not applied at the time they were submitted.) Or as the Emacs bug tracker graphs put it:

And in other Emacs-related news, I thought it was really amusing to see The New York Times using Emacs as an example when educating people about commit messages, and it was doubly amusing that the author used a commit message of mine when doing so.

So now I can say that I’m a New York Times-published author.

If it wasn’t for the small detail that that would be grossly misleading.

In conclusion:

Here’s a picture of some potatoes.

Washed Away

As we saw in the previous episode of this mysterious saga, the pigeons had left the nest on my balcony, and just a few days later, I finally got my gloves and washing supplies off and started to scrub down the nesty area.

The pigeons hadn’t pooped much on the chair-like object…

… or indeed in the nest area. There was a few downy feathers there, though.

But that sorry state of the nest makes me wonder whether this wasn’t a case of a seagull attacking the nest and gulping down the egg, but rather strong winds and rain sweeping the egg away? It gets really windy here at times; that’s why I have heavy furniture on the balconies. Anything else will just blow away.

So was the egg lying in the roof gutters? Nope. Bits of the nest was, though.

Oh, well. All nice and clean now, and I guess I should inspect it more often to dissuade any further nesting attempts.

Here’s the poor abortive pigeon parent in happier days, just a few weeks ago.

Empty Nest

As we saw in the previous episode, some pigeons had laid an egg on my balcony the day before I left for Barcelona. I saw one pigeon sitting on the egg quite happily, too.

But now I’m back, and here’s what’s on the balcony now:

No pigeon! No egg! Some feathers!

What happened? I mean, I’m no ornithologist, but I’m assuming the pigeons can’t have taken the egg with them. Perhaps a… seagull ate it? A crow? Do they do that?

Oh, well. I guess I should clean up the remains of the nest before some new pigeons decide to move in. Gotta get out some gloves and get busy.

Mañana. Mañana.