When you commit to git, how long does it matter?

Commit to git

Erik Bernhardsson has been running Big Data on Git repositories of various kinds. He was trying to find out what the half-life of code is. That is, when you commit to a repository, your code becomes part of a project, but eventually other code will replace it and it will no longer be part of the current version. How stable is the codebase, what is the half-life of code? And why is it different in different projects?

As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project. The idea is to go back in history historical and run a git blame […]