Introduction

I've released a number of Python packages over the past few months and I've been curious about how I should version them. I decided to write a new package plottags that I could use to plot the tag history for a repository with respect to time. Here are a few of the plots I've created with plottags.

Tagging History for CPython

Tagging History for Ansible

Tagging History for Django

Tagging History for django-compressor

Tagging History for Gunicorn

Tagging History for Nginx

Discussion

I think the most interesting graph is Ansible's. The Ansible project has an incredibly steady tagging practice. I immediately assume that this stability is due to the fact that Ansible has a number of incentives to release steadily. Ansible is, after all, a product people pay for. After seeing Nginx's graph, I'm pretty confident that we'd see some similarly steady trends in other psuedo-commercial packages.