Same file, different changes: The potential of meta-maintenance on GitHub
Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is important, especially for keeping the most up-to-date version of...
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sg-smu-ink.sis_research-98662024-06-13T09:11:23Z Same file, different changes: The potential of meta-maintenance on GitHub HATA, Hideaki KULA, Raula ISHIO, Takashi TREUDE, Christoph Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is important, especially for keeping the most up-to-date version of reused code. Different to related work, we propose the concept of meta-maintenance-i.e., tracking how the same files evolve in different repositories with the aim to provide useful maintenance opportunities to those files. We conduct an exploratory study by analyzing repositories from seven different programming languages to explore the potential of meta-maintenance. Our results indicate that a majority of active repositories on GitHub contains at least one file which is also present in another repository, and that a significant minority of these files are maintained differently in the different repositories which contain them. We manually analyzed a representative sample of shared files and their variants to understand which changes might be useful for meta-maintenance. Our findings support the potential of meta-maintenance and open up avenues for future work to capitalize on this potential. 2021-05-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8863 info:doi/10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00076 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9866/viewcontent/meta.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Computer languages Statistical analysis Tools Maintenance engineering Software Software development management Software engineering Software Engineering |
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Computer languages Statistical analysis Tools Maintenance engineering Software Software development management Software engineering Software Engineering HATA, Hideaki KULA, Raula ISHIO, Takashi TREUDE, Christoph Same file, different changes: The potential of meta-maintenance on GitHub |
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Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is important, especially for keeping the most up-to-date version of reused code. Different to related work, we propose the concept of meta-maintenance-i.e., tracking how the same files evolve in different repositories with the aim to provide useful maintenance opportunities to those files. We conduct an exploratory study by analyzing repositories from seven different programming languages to explore the potential of meta-maintenance. Our results indicate that a majority of active repositories on GitHub contains at least one file which is also present in another repository, and that a significant minority of these files are maintained differently in the different repositories which contain them. We manually analyzed a representative sample of shared files and their variants to understand which changes might be useful for meta-maintenance. Our findings support the potential of meta-maintenance and open up avenues for future work to capitalize on this potential. |
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author |
HATA, Hideaki KULA, Raula ISHIO, Takashi TREUDE, Christoph |
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HATA, Hideaki KULA, Raula ISHIO, Takashi TREUDE, Christoph |
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HATA, Hideaki |
title |
Same file, different changes: The potential of meta-maintenance on GitHub |
title_short |
Same file, different changes: The potential of meta-maintenance on GitHub |
title_full |
Same file, different changes: The potential of meta-maintenance on GitHub |
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Same file, different changes: The potential of meta-maintenance on GitHub |
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Same file, different changes: The potential of meta-maintenance on GitHub |
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same file, different changes: the potential of meta-maintenance on github |
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Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University |
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2021 |
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https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8863 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9866/viewcontent/meta.pdf |
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