What Commit History Can Tell Us About the Hive Ecosystem

Hey everyone,

I was curious about the development activity in a few key Hive repositories, so I decided to take a peek at their commit history over the years. This led me down a fun little path of data visualization using a couple of common command-line tools.

The Simple Method

To start, I needed a way to extract the year of every commit in a repository. A simple git command does the trick. This command gets the commit dates, formats them to show only the year, sorts them, and then counts the number of unique entries for each year.

git log --pretty='format:%cd' --date=format:'%Y' | sort | uniq -c

The output looks something like this:

     11 2016
    257 2017
    939 2018
    140 2019
    358 2020
     57 2021
    175 2025

With that data saved to a file, I could then use a simple gnuplot script to create a nice chart.

gnuplot -p <<-GNUPLOT
  set grid
  set term pngcairo size 1000, 300
  set output 'commits.png'
  set title 'hive-nectar'
  unset key
  plot 'data.dat' using 1:2 with linespoints lw 2 lc rgb 'black'
GNUPLOT

Here's the result for my hive-nectar library. Since it's a fork of beem, it includes a lot of history before I took it over. Only the 2025 commits are mine.

---

Turning a One-Liner into a Tool

Now that I had the basic process down, I expanded it into a reusable Bash script to make it easier to run on any repository with different options. Grab the Gist Here

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

# Default options
OUTPUT="commits.png"
TITLE="Number of commits in the repository over time"
START_YEAR=""
REPO_DIR="."
WIDTH=1000
HEIGHT=300
NO_CLEANUP=false

usage() {
  cat <<EOF
Usage: $(basename "$0") [options]

Options:
  -o, --output FILE        Output image file (default: commits.png)
  -s, --start YEAR         Start year (inclusive; optional)
  -t, --title STRING       Plot title (default: Number of commits in the repository over time)
  -d, --dir DIRECTORY      Repository directory (default: current)
  -w, --width PIXELS       Width of the PNG image (default: 1000)
  -H, --height PIXELS      Height of the PNG image (default: 300)
  --no-cleanup             Do not remove temporary data file
  -h, --help               Show this help
EOF
}

# Parse CLI arguments
while [[ $# -gt 0 ]]; do
  case "$1" in
  -o | --output)
    OUTPUT="$2"
    shift 2
    ;;
  -s | --start)
    START_YEAR="$2"
    shift 2
    ;;
  -t | --title)
    TITLE="$2"
    shift 2
    ;;
  -d | --dir)
    REPO_DIR="$2"
    shift 2
    ;;
  -w | --width)
    WIDTH="$2"
    shift 2
    ;;
  -H | --height)
    HEIGHT="$2"
    shift 2
    ;;
  --no-cleanup)
    NO_CLEANUP=true
    shift
    ;;
  -h | --help)
    usage
    exit 0
    ;;
  --)
    shift
    break
    ;;
  -*)
    echo "Unknown option: $1" >&2
    usage
    exit 1
    ;;
  *)
    break
    ;;
  esac
done

# Create temporary data file
DATA_FILE="$(mktemp)"
if [[ "$NO_CLEANUP" != true ]]; then
  trap 'rm -f "$DATA_FILE"' EXIT
fi

# Build data: year count pairs
if [[ -n "${START_YEAR:-}" ]]; then
  START_YEAR_INT="$(printf "%d" "$START_YEAR" 2>/dev/null || printf "")"
  if [[ -z "$START_YEAR_INT" ]]; then
    echo "Invalid start year: $START_YEAR" >&2
    exit 1
  fi
  git -C "$REPO_DIR" log --pretty='format:%cd' --date=format:'%Y' |
    sort |
    uniq -c |
    awk -v s="$START_YEAR_INT" '$2>=s {print $2, $1}' >"$DATA_FILE"
else
  git -C "$REPO_DIR" log --pretty='format:%cd' --date=format:'%Y' |
    sort |
    uniq -c |
    awk '{print $2, $1}' >"$DATA_FILE"
fi

if [[ ! -s "$DATA_FILE" ]]; then
  echo "No commit data available for the specified options." >&2
  exit 0
fi

# Plot with gnuplot (using a here-doc for readability)
gnuplot -p <<-GNUPLOT
  set grid
  set term pngcairo size ${WIDTH},${HEIGHT}
  set output '${OUTPUT}'
  set title '${TITLE}'
  unset key
  plot '${DATA_FILE}' using 1:2 with linespoints lw 2 lc rgb 'black'
GNUPLOT

# If requested, keep the data file; otherwise, the trap will remove it
if [[ "$NO_CLEANUP" = true ]]; then
  trap - EXIT
  echo "Temporary data file kept at: ${DATA_FILE}"
fi

---

A Look at the Hive Ecosystem

With the new script, I ran it on a few other key repositories.

My Interpretation

What's interesting is the general trend across most of these projects: the number of commits seems to have dropped over time. This suggests two things to me. One, it could mean that the codebases have stabilized and don't require as much work to fix issues as they did in their early days. Two, it might also reflect what many of us have felt: the active developer community has been shrinking. It's likely a combination of both. It is nice to see an upward trend in the Hive-Engine developer community though.

As always,
Michael Garcia a.k.a. TheCrazyGM