This year was a very interesting year in the development in KWin. After having been the maintainer for several years, I knew that I would not be able to continue being maintainer for personal reasons. Personally I had tried to lower my contributions for quite some time already and encouraged others to do reviews, keeping out of some reviews completely. In 2018 several of such code contributions landed which I hadn’t looked at all and which work out greatly – an example is the new excellent blur effect which I didn’t look at the code at all.

When I stepped down as maintainer I had to read many negative and fearful comments doubting the future of KWin. Personally I was very positive that me stepping down would not have a negative impact, in fact I even hoped for positive impact as it gives new blood the chance to fill up the gap and bring in new ideas. I had become very conservative over time.

So I just run some git stats [1] over the KWin repository to try to verify the assumption that me stepping down had no negative impact: In 2017 there were 614 non scripty commits. The author with most commits was me with 387. Overall 37 developers contributed to KWin.

In 2018 (01.01.2018-26.12.2018) there were 644 non scripty commits authored by 48 developers. The developer with most contributions is Vlad (241). I am no longer the top contributor in KWin (“only” 115 commits) – the last time this happened was 2008, the year I joined KWin development.

I am very happy about this development. We have new developers like Vlad and Alex working on areas which had been neglected for quite some time. The way the effect system improved thanks to them is really great. We have developers like David and Roman improving the Wayland support and overall KWin core. The knowledge about KWin gets spread and the development work is spread over more shoulders. Having a single developer doing the majority of commits is not always healthy. We can see the positive effects this year: we have more contributors overall and more contributors contributing multiple patches.

[1] git shortlog -sne –since=”01 Jan 2018″ –before=”01 Jan 2019″ and git shortlog -sne –since=”01 Jan 2017″ –before=”01 Jan 2018″