The merge commits made by Linus will have as their date and time the time when he made the merge locally on his own machine, which can be different from the time that he pushed those changes out (and given that he specifically designed git to have this capability it seems rather plausible that he uses it).

Merge commits are really the same as non-merge commits. The only difference is the number of parent commits, which is irrelevant for this discussion.

For what is worth kragan is entirely right here.

As strawman arguments often are within their own context. That doesn't mean I'm wrong. My point that merge commits were included in the OP's article and data went unanswered by @kragen, and it's directly relevant to what I said at the top; merge commits don't represent work time, but they're being counted here. Code commits also don't necessarily represent work time either, due to squashing, stashing, and general dev practice, so I haven't heard any evidence that convinces me otherwise. Do you have any to add?

Merging is work too. The times of merges are indicators that the person did work at that time.

Obviously the methodology is limited but it does seem to work well in practice. If you have evidence that the statistics are wrong for one of the listed programmers, please do share it.

Your attack on my integrity here is unwelcome and entirely unwarranted; that does make me angry. I regret having given you so much of my time in this thread and having assumed good faith on your part.

> Your attack on my integrity here is unwelcome

I absolutely did no such thing. You may wish to consider taking that untrue statement back, for the sake of your integrity. Nothing I said is attacking you personally in any way.

You called for a retraction of my top comment, implying it is flip-flopping and hypocritical, but you misunderstood my argument and made a rebuttal point that didn't address mine. That's a straw man, and since you appear to believe "straw man" is judgemental, it is not. It simply means you're arguing against a different point than the one I made.

It's a fact that you haven't yet responded to the merge commit point I made, and that merge commits in the OPs data are relevant to my original comment.

> I regret having given you so much time

You make it sound like I'm supposed to appreciate you calling my words untrue and "completely irrelevant". How does arguing with me and saying I'm attempting to defend an irrelevant position amount to you extending good faith?

I find kragan's comments to be creating strawman arguments. They are unnecessarily confrontational.