X.Org Server Development Continues Trending Lower

Half-way through the year, the X.Org Server has seen just over 300 commits, well down compared to a few years ago around this time where it would see about three times as many commits.

Hitting the middle of the year and otherwise a slow summer weekend for Linux/open-source news, I decided to run some fresh Git statistics on the xserver tree. As of the process there's been 15,539 commits from 518 different authors. The X.Org Server tree is made up of 1699 files that produce a total of 704,588 lines of code.

So far this year there's been just 302 commits that touch around nine thousand lines of code. Still this year we could end up seeing more commits than in 2015, when there were 496 commits, but so far is trending lower than any other year in more than one decade. Back in 2008 there were 2,114 commits and from 2009 to 2012 there were more than 1,000 commits each year. In many of these years, the code changes amounted to shifting around more than 100 thousand lines of code each year.

This downward trend could be attributed to more developers focusing on Wayland, companies like Apple/Intel/Ubuntu/Oracle/Sun devoting less resources to upstream X happenings in recent years, and much work happening outside of xserver proper like in Mesa and Pixman and libinput.

This year there's been 38 different contributors to the X.Org Server with Adam Jackson leading the way, who has been serving as the X.Org Server release maintainer lately. Other significant contributors include Eric Anholt, Keith Packard, Olivier Fourdan, Michel Dänzer, and Dave Airlie.

The overall line count has been steady now the past few years.

It will be interesting to see when X.Org Server 1.19 ends up getting released now as that's well past the six month release cadence and there hasn't been much (any?) communication recently about driving that release. More X Server Git stats can be found here.