Four years ago, I wrote an entire version-control system in a 14-hour burst of inspiration. It’s a small, lightweight tool designed for solo single-file projects that allows several histories to coexist in a single directory – good for /etc files, HOWTOs, or that script collection in your ~/bin directory.
I wasn’t certain, at the time, that the concept would prove out as a production tool for anyone but me. But it did. Here are some statistics: Over 4 years, 21 point releases, 644 commits, 11 committers. Six issues filed by five different users, 20 merge requests. I know of about half a dozen users who’ve raised their hands on IRC or in blog comments. Code has about quintupled in size from the first alpha release (0.1, 513 lines) to 2757 lines today.
That is the statistical profile of a modest success – in fact the developer roster is larger than I realized before I went back through the logs. The main thing looking at the history reveals is that there’s a user community out there that has been sending a steady trickle of minor bug reports and enhancement requests over the whole life of the project. This is a lot more encouraging than dead air would be.
Of course I don’t now how many total users SRC has. But we can base a guess on fanout patterns observed when other projects (usually much larger ones) have done polls to try to measure userbase size. A sound extrapolation would be somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude more than have made themselves visible – so, somewhere between about 200 and 2000.
(There seems to be something like an exponential scaling law at work here. For random open source project X old enough to have passed the sudden-infant-death filter, if there’s an identifiable core dev group in the single-digit range you can generally expect the casual contributors to be about 10x more and the userbase to be at least 100x more.)
SRC has held up pretty well as a design exercise, too. I’ve had complaints about minor bugs in the UI, but nobody bitching about the UI itself. Credit to the Subversion developers I swiped most of the UI design from; their data model may be obsolete, but nobody in VCS-land has done better at UI and I was at least smart enough not to try.
2.7KLOC is nicely compact for an entire version-control system supporting both RCS and SCCS back ends. I don’t expect it to get much larger; there are only two minor items left on the to-do list, neither of which should add significant lines of code.
Today I’m shipping 1.21. With gratitude to everyone that helped improve it.