curl source code age

In every software project that has been around for a while there is of course newer code and older code. A question that often pops up at least in my mind is then: How much of the old code has actually survived over the years and is still being in use today?

I started off writing a script that iterates over all release tags we have set in the curl git repository and for every such tag, it extracts all relevant source files and runs git blame on them. With the -t --line-porcelain options, the output is really easy to parse.

For every such release tag, we get a large number of lines with different timestamps. Then the script sorts all those timestamps, iterates over them, counts how many that were done within different intervals in time and outputs those counters in a formatted line.

Iterating over several hundred tags in a code base of curl size and running git blame like this is not a quick operation. On my decently fast machine, a full such round takes well over an hour. Admittedly there is probably ways the algorithm can be improved.

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