I tend to look on commit count as a negative when reviewing open source projects. TeX is probably the highest quality open source project and it's has had maybe 15 commits since I was born. Bash has had about 15 commits in the last five years. Then there's everyone else who's playing to win the Github game with 500 stars and 5,000 commits. That level of activity might impress normal people but it doesn't impress me.
> I tend to look on commit count as a negative when reviewing open source projects.
I do agree that tracking commit counts isn't very useful but tracking commit frequency, in my opinion, is quite useful. I'm obviously biased but I use commit frequency to tell me how fast a project is moving and what is the investment.
by breaking down how frequently contributors commit on a daily basis, you can get a very good sense of investment and speed. In the case of the vscode project, Microsoft is investing a lot of resources into vscode and it is evolving at an extremely fast pace.
Software metrics in general isn't the issue, it's the lack of context around them that is the issue.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the tool that I'm linking to
