[enitihas]

For those who haven't looked at some of the commits by @pixiuPL, the list is here : https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commits?author=pixiuPL.

To summarize: It does not look like the guy has done a single commit with any meaning. His commits are basically the following:

1. Adding his own name in package.json 2. Adding and deleting whitespace. 3. Deleting the entire project and commiting. 4. Adding the entire project back again and commiting.

Just out of curiosity: How likely is that someone may be able to use a large number of such non functional commits(adding and removing whitespace) to a popular open source repository to boost their career ambitions.(e,g. Claiming that they made 50 commits to a popular project might sound impressive in an interview.)

[captain_murdock]

Grab some popcorn and give this a read: https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/15345.

@pixiuPL thinks he's king of the world, but gets rightfully put in his place.

[enitihas]

I think an interesting project may be to look at popular github repositories and searching for such 'stat builders',i.e, people who make commits of no utility just to boost their github stats.

[nolok]

Given that he hides those behind fake commit message (unless one counts removing a comment or a whitespace "code refactoring), I would say rather likely.

[enitihas]

It seems there are no limits to this madness.e,g https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/970edb9b683175a6b1...

In this commit the guy deletes two spaces from a file, and adds copyright for his name at the top. Going through his commits has made me extremely shocked. I mean how did such low quality commits made it into the master branch of the repo. It is like these commits were invisible to all the visitors and users of the repo.

[michaelermer]

Also look at stuff like this... https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/pull/5468

[enitihas]

The main question which is coming to my mind right now is how on earth did this guy get contributor access to the repository. And here I used to think that being maintainer of a large open source project must take a lot of talent and hard work.

[gulperxcx]

Sounds like you're getting ideas.