imageI’ve been experimenting with a super-neat source code management (SCM) visualization tool called Gource.
In Gource, software projects are displayed as an animated tree with the root directory of the project at its center. Directories appear as branches with files as leaves. Developers can be seen working on the tree at the times they contributed to the project. Gource includes built-in log generation support for Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and SVN.  Note that you’ll need your SCM’s command-line utilities in your path for Gource to work.
For fun, I ran Gource 0.42 on the EDKII repository hosted on Github, located here:
https://github.com/tianocore/edk2
Here are the steps I followed:
  1. Download the win32 version of Gource
  2. Unzip, and add Gource to my path
  3. git clone the EDKII repository locally
  4. Run this command from the cloned repository directory:
    gource -w --highlight-users -c 4.0 --title EDKII -s 2 --start-date 2015-04-01
Here’s the final result:
EDKII, past year
There are TONS of command-line options that allow you to configure Gource to your liking.  See the Readme.txt for complete information.
Gource is open-source software released under the GNU General Public License.  It may not give you earth-shattering insights into your codebase, but it’s a whole lot of fun to use.  Try experimenting with the many command-line options—this is software that nerds will love!  Download it and run it on your codebase today!

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