The Incredible Shrinking Codebase

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

Hi all, I wanted to provide a few interesting observations about the
codebase over the life of the project.

If you follow the codebase on Ohloh.net, we are now back down to the
size we were in 2009 in absolute terms.  This does not really measure
actual terms because comments, blank lines, and documentation is
counted.  In the time since 2009, our comments have grown by nearly
25% largely due to efforts to add POD to the perl files.

When we start subtracting documentation, however, the picture changes
dramatically.  About a third of what Ohloh shows is XML documentation,
mostly for the database.  Removing this, the HTML documentation, and
the manual's LaTeX sources, we get  a even more.  The codebase in
terms of lines of actual Perl (not including comments or
documentation) is smaller than it has been since we started the
project.  In general we have been adding features, and doing quite a
bit more with a bit less.  The entire increase in codebase size over
the life of the project is due to better documentation, not more code.

Just seemed interesting and figured I would pass it along.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers