Reviving GitStats — Breathing New Life into Git History Analysis

Recently, in the evenings (usually after my child has gone to sleep), I’ve been working on something: reviving the long-dormant GitStats project.

Previously, I wrote two articles about GitStats. If you’re interested, you can check them out:

• Git History Statistics Generator GitStats
• Automatically Providing Multi-Dimensional Code Analysis Reports to My Boss Regularly via Jenkins

What is GitStats

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GitStats is a Python-based tool for analyzing the history of a Git repository and generating an HTML report.

However, it only supports Python 2, and the author has stopped maintaining it (the last commit was 9 years ago).

In current development environments, compatibility and ease of use are significantly limited, but its value remains undeniable.

Therefore, I decided to modernize this project.

Completed Work

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1. Migration to Python 3.9+: Refactored the code to support Python 3 versions. ✅
2. Creation of a Modern CI/CD Pipeline: Added CI/CD tools for easier continuous development and release. ✅
3. Publication to PyPI: Users can now install it via pip install gitstats. ✅
4. Docker Image Provided: Users no longer need to handle dependencies themselves; running gitstats is more convenient. ✅
5. Online Preview Provided: Created a demonstration page to allow users to intuitively understand GitStats’ functionality. ✅

Special Thanks

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Here, I would like to express my special thanks to Sumin Byeon (@suminb). From his introduction, he seems to be a programmer living in South Korea.

The original owner of GitStats on PyPI was him, so I couldn’t directly use that name. I tried other names, such as git-stats and gitstory, but they were rejected by PyPI due to similarity to other projects.

Seeing that his project hadn’t been maintained for five years, I sent him an email on a whim, asking if he would be willing to transfer the GitStats name to me, as I was reviving the project.

Unexpectedly, he replied quickly and eventually agreed to transfer the GitStats name to me. His only condition was that if I stopped maintaining GitStats in the future and someone else needed the name, I would do the same as he did and transfer the name to them.

I agreed and promised to maintain GitStats long-term. (Hopefully, I can do it.)

Future Plans

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1. Addressing Valuable Issues: Reviewing unresolved issues in the original repository and selecting valuable ones for fixing.
2. Reviewing Existing Pull Requests: Evaluating PRs from the original repository and merging them into the current project as appropriate.
3. Updating Documentation: Improving the documentation to make it clearer and easier to understand.
4. Adding New Features: Adding features to make the project more powerful and useful.
5. UI Optimization: Improving the visual appeal and user experience of the interface.

How to Participate

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If you are interested in improving GitStats, you are welcome to participate in this project! You can:

1. Suggest Features: Propose ideas or feature requests to help the project better meet user needs.
2. Contribute Code: Fix bugs or add features to directly contribute to the project.
3. Share and Promote: Recommend GitStats to friends or communities who might be interested.

Finally, let’s work together to bring GitStats back to life!

Written at 2:50 AM on November 28, 2024

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