freebsdcontribs

Over 30 years of FreeBSD development activity, packaged for R.

This dataset covers two aspects of the FreeBSD project:

Git commit history (1993-2026) — every commit, every author, extracted from the cloned repository
Phabricator signups (2013-2026) — account registrations on the code review platform

No personal information is included. Authors are counted, not identified.

Installation

# devtools::install_github("chrislongros/freebsdcontribs")
install.packages("freebsdcontribs", repos = c('https://chrislongros.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

Datasets

Dataset	Rows	Granularity	Source	What it measures
`freebsd_commits`	953,162	Per-commit	Git repo	Every commit with timestamp and author
`freebsd_daily_commits`	11,882	Daily	Git repo	Commits per day
`freebsd_daily_authors`	2,041	Daily	Git repo	First-time committers per day
`freebsd_contributors`	147	Monthly	Phabricator	New signups per month
`freebsd_contributors_daily`	2,531	Daily	Phabricator	New signups per day

From git repository (complete data)

`freebsd_commits`

Every individual FreeBSD commit with full timestamp (to the second) and anonymized author ID.

Column	Type	Description
`timestamp`	POSIXct	Commit timestamp in UTC
`author_id`	character	Anonymized 12-character author hash

`freebsd_daily_commits`

Column	Type	Description
`date`	Date	Commit date
`commits`	integer	Commits that day
`cumulative_commits`	integer	Running total

953,162 total commits across 11,882 active days (1993-2026)

`freebsd_daily_authors`

Column	Type	Description
`date`	Date	Date of first commit
`new_authors`	integer	New committers that day
`cumulative_authors`	integer	Running total

3,323 unique committers over the project's lifetime

From Phabricator (signup data)

`freebsd_contributors` (monthly)

Column	Type	Description
`month`	Date	First day of each month
`new_contributors`	integer	New signups that month
`cumulative`	integer	Running total

`freebsd_contributors_daily` (daily)

Column	Type	Description
`date`	Date	Signup date
`new_contributors`	integer	New signups that day
`cumulative`	integer	Running total

7,602 total signups (November 2013 - March 2026). Note: signups != committers. Many people register but never commit.

Quick start

library(freebsdcontribs)

# Cumulative commits over time
data(freebsd_daily_commits)
plot(freebsd_daily_commits$date, freebsd_daily_commits$cumulative_commits,
     type = "l", lwd = 2, col = "red",
     xlab = "Date", ylab = "Total Commits",
     main = "FreeBSD Cumulative Commits (1993-2026)")

# Committer growth
data(freebsd_daily_authors)
plot(freebsd_daily_authors$date, freebsd_daily_authors$cumulative_authors,
     type = "l", lwd = 2, col = "steelblue",
     xlab = "Date", ylab = "Unique Committers",
     main = "FreeBSD Committer Growth")