Visualizing Source Repos with gource

by David Humphrey

The other day some of my colleagues were tweeting about gource, the amazing OpenGL SCM visualization tool. It allows you to visualize git, hg, bazaar (and possible CVS/SVN) logs as animated graphs. Building it on Mac was a bit of a pain, given the amount of crap I had to install for dependencies. However the experience of using the tool once installed is the complete opposite. Go to your source dir, and type 'gource'.

I looked at a half-dozen git reops I work on, and even tried mozilla-central (I gave up after 2 hours of Reading Logs... for Mozilla). Here's a video I made of the processing.js git repo from initial release by John Resig to hand-off to Al MacDonald to the eventual take over by Seneca students.  It brings back a lot of memories, and highlights the fact that me being a stubborn hg user refusing to use git and only submitting patches means I don't get any play!  I've since learned the error of my ways.  <3 git.