Recently, I was wondering how many Debian Developers are actively working on RC bugs in some way or another in the time period of the last release (squeeze) to now (shortly? before wheezy).

I therefore grabbed the mailing list archives of debian-bugs-dist@ from gmane, used only those messages whose X-Debian-PR-Message header matches an RC bug (list retrieved from UDD) and then attributed the message counts to the appropriate Debian Developer.

I am sure that there are subtle mistakes in the data I retrieved and that there most likely is a better way to achieve the same results, but this is only to get a trend and should be good enough for that.

So, it turns out that 514 different Debian Developers have sent messages regarding RC bugs since squeeze. That’s about half of our 985 total active Debian Developers.

I would love to show a good histogram of the actual message counts (not sure how well received showing the raw data is…), but I suck at visualizing such data in a compact way. Is there anyone familiar with R (or other free data visualization tools) and willing to help? I can send you the CSV file, just send me an email to stapelberg@.