code_swarm video of Ubuntu uploads

Joey Hess posted a draft of a code_swarm video for d-i a couple of weeks ago, which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to do something similar for Ubuntu for a while now as it’s just about our archive’s fifth birthday. I have a more or less complete archive of all our -changes mailing lists locally (I think I’m missing some of the very early ones, before the end of July 2004; let me know if you were one of the very early Canonical employees and have a record of these), and with the aid of launchpadlib it’s fairly easy to map all the e-mail addresses into Launchpad user names, massage out some of the more obvious duplicates, and then treat the stream of uploads as if it were a stream of commits.

If you haven’t seen code_swarm before, each dot represents an upload, and the dots “swarm” around their corresponding committers’ names; more active committers have larger swarms of dots and brighter names. I assigned a colour to each of our archive components (uploads aren’t really at the C code vs. Python code vs. translations vs. whatever kind of granularity that you see in other code_swarm videos), which mostly means that people who predominantly upload to main are in roughly an Ubuntu tan colour, people who predominantly upload to universe are coloured bluish, and people with a good mixture tend to come out coloured green. If I get a bit more time I may try to figure out enough about video editing software to add some captions.

Here’s the video (194 MB).