Two Years Of Akonadi: 2014, 2015

Not so long ago, I blogged about KDEPIM and how contributions varied between 2014 and 2015. One of the comments on that blog post mentioned Akonadi. Now Akonadi has its own git repo; actually, it has about 14. So I decided to take a very quick glance into that, too.

Akonadi and git

Before we get to the specific business of contributions to Akonadi, there is a topic I want to quickly address: Akonadi's git repos. Proliferation of git repos seems to be quite rife inside KDE...

One of the problems when evaluating Akonadi is that it has 14 repos. The primary server is easily found here. On first glance, it appears that certain plugins for Akonadi have their own repo. I'm sure there is a good reason for this, but I could also think of some great reasons to have one repo for all of Akonadi or, at least, a repo for the main server and a repo for all plugins.

The Blue Blobs

2014

So here we see 31 contributors spread quite evenly across the year. As always in KDE, a large proportion of the contributors are around only for one week in this repo (many of them contributing elsewhere in KDE, of course). The main actors are Dan and Montel (both KDAB) and Christian from Kolab Systems. Looking at this and knowing what I know about KDEPIM, I'd say this is a fairly healthy community that could do with some more, regular contributors.

2015

The obvious observation here is there are about 1/3 fewer contributors. This is never a good sign and certainly not something I would expect to see in the community around a well-used technology. Thankfully, it is only the one-shot contributors that seem to have disappeared. The overall health seems the same as in 2014, to me. Dan is still working hard in this project and Volker has increased his contributions along with Sergio (all KDAB).

Hmm, that's weird!

It's impossible to explain what has caused the drop is casual contribution to Akonadi simply from looking at these pictures. Since we saw a similar decline in contribution to KDEPIM, we can speculate that Akonadi is sharing its fate with the overall KDEPIM suite. This makes sense.

But here's what I find weird: Christian Mollekopf has basically disappeared. Come back, dude! Surely Kolab Systems have a vested interest in Akonadi's success, non?