The Development Pace Of Systemd Fell Sharply This Year

With systemd having the most commits ever in 2015 for this project, I was curious to see how the statistics for 2016 compared... To some surprise, the number of commits to systemd fell sharply and the code churn is also down to a point not seen in a few years.

In 2015 there were 5,528 commits to systemd while this year there have been 3,768 commits -- a low not seen since 2012 when there were 2554 commits. But then when it comes to new code, this year were 156,491 added (and 94,288 lines removed), a low since 2011. Last year in comparison there were more than double that for lines added: 333k vs. 156k, though last year they also removed a lot of code too.

It was surprising to see the commits and code churn fall so sharply this year, but perhaps it's a sign of the maturing of the project? The release count this year is also down seeing just 4 releases in 2016 while there were 10 releases in 2015 and 10 in 2014.

The most prolific contributors to systemd this year were Lennart Poettering, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Martin Pitt, Evgeny Vereshchagin, Daniel Mack, and Susant Sahani. Compared to prior years, Tom Gundersen and David Herrmann are among the common systemd developer names missing from the list, though this year they've been focusing their effort on the related BUS1 initiative.

As of this morning the systemd Git tree is up to 2,218 files comprised of 779,627 lines from 27,916 commits from 913 different authors. Those wanting to run through these EOY2016 Git stats for systemd can find them here.

While I'm at it and for those wanting to relive the best systemd moments of 2016, here were the most viewed articles:

Systemd Rolls Out Its Own Mount Tool
Systemd-mount is the newest tool added to systemd by Lennart Poettering.

What Systemd Developers Want To Change With Linux User-Space In 2016
Last weekend at FOSDEM, Lennart Poettering was one of the keynote speakers where he presented on systemd's user-space plans for the years.

A New Wireless Daemon Is In Development To Potentially Replace wpa_supplicant
In addition to the BUS1 presentation, also exciting from the systemd.conf 2016 conference is a thorough walkthrough of a new wireless daemon for Linux being developed by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center.

Systemd 230 Is Upsetting Some Over Its KillUserProcess Setting
Systemd 230 was released just last week and it has taken heat not only for opening up FBDEV to potential security issues, which already reverted, but also for changing the default behavior of user processes.

Systemd 230 Released
A new release of systemd is available this weekend.

Systemd 229 Released With Many Changes, DNS Resolver Now Fully Supported
The last major systemd update was all the way back in November, which is rather strange considering their normal frequent releases, but that changed today with the release of systemd 229.

Systemd 230 Opens Up A New Graphics Vulnerability & FBDEV Still Should Die
A change made in the recent release of systemd 230 makes it easy for rogue user processes to be able to spy on your desktop, assuming a few conditions are met.

How To Use Systemd For Application Sandboxing & How To Easily Crash Systemd
Another one of the interesting systemd.conf 2016 presentations in Berlin was a talk by Djalal Harouni of EndoCode for using systemd to carry out application sandboxing.

It Looks Like Systemd 231 Will Soon Be Released, Adds MemoryDenyWriteExecute
It's been a while since the last systemd release (230 in May) while it looks like the systemd 231 release is imminent.

Systemd 232 Coming Soon With Numerous New Features
Systemd 232 is right around the corner to succeed the systemd 231 release from July.