ohloh

Ohloh Reports May Paint an Inaccurate Picture

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
at 1:45pm

Through no fault of the Ohloh tool itself -- it can only report on what it's told, after all -- the reports that Ohloh generates should not be considered The Gospel.

After cruising the site for a few minutes today, and oooohing and aaahing at like many others have been, I popped open a project I'd never heard of: PHPSurveyor.

Ohloh speculates that PHPSurveyor has 731,822 lines of code, and would cost approximately $11 million dollars to reproduce.

Wow.

Upon closer inspection of the history of the project on Ohloh, it appears that the Ohloh crawler is looking at the root of the PHPSurveyor SVN repository, which happens to contain all their releases AND their current working trunk.

I'm sure that Ohloh is using a somewhat different algorithm, but just to get a ballpark comparison, I ran recursive wc -l, on an 'svn export' of the full repository, excluding image files (.gif/.jpg/.png/.svg) and .txt files:

Lines       Path
=====       ====
1,098,024   / (full repository)
  288,618   /source
  273,544   /source
              minus a dir called "rewrite"
  195,198   /source/phpsurveyor
              minus 3rd party ADODB, phpMailer and PEAR

That's quite a difference. I can't be sure, but in Ohloh-speak I think I just saved someone over $9 million dollars. :)