Visualising Drupal Development History with Gource

Over the Christmas break I came across gource, a software version control visualization tool. Gource produces really nice visual representations of software projects growing. About 2 years ago David Norman produced a gource video of development of Drupal up to the 7 release. This is pretty cool, but it only shows who committed the patch, not who contributed to it.

After some searching I found the Drupal contribution analyzer sandbox project. This module allows you to produce contributor tag clouds and code swarm videos. This was closer to what I was after, but I had to patch patch drupal_log_generator.py to support the gource custom log format.

The result is a 5:23 minute video showing the growth of Drupal.

The first few years things are pretty consistent and easy to follow. The Drupal 8 development cycle shows how much the community of contributors has grown. Towards the end of last year things look really chaotic.

To produce the video I used a clone of the Drupal 8 branch as at some time on January 1, 2013. The gource command I used was:
gource --log-format custom -i 500 -s 0.0001 -a 0.01 -r 30 --title "Drupal" --highlight-users --disable-progress --hide filenames -1280x720 drupal --bloom-intensity 0.2 --bloom-multiplier 0.2 --stop-at-end /tmp/commit.log -o -| ffmpeg -y -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - -vcodec libvpx -b 10000K ~/Videos/drupal.webm

I considered writing a script to find and download user avatars from groups.drupal.org but after reviewing the video without them I decided it would be too cluttered.

Can you find your name in the video?

Note: I gave up on trying to embed the video