TY - GEN
T1 - Debsources
T2 - 8th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2014
AU - Caneill, Matthieu
AU - Zacchiroli, Stefano
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 ACM.
PY - 2014/9/18
Y1 - 2014/9/18
N2 - Context. Software evolution has been an active field of research in recent years, but studies on macro-level software evolution-i.e., on the evolution of large software collections over many years-are scarce, despite the increasing popularity of intermediate vendors as a way to deliver software to final users. Goal. We want to ease the study of both day-by-day and long-term Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) evolution trends at the macro-level, focusing on the Debian distribution as a proxy of relevant FOSS projects. Method. We have built Debsources, a software platform to gather, search, and publish on the Web all the source code of Debian and measures about it. We have set up a public Debsources instance at http://sources.debian.net, integrated it into the Debian infrastructure to receive live updates of new package releases, and written plugins to compute popular source code metrics. We have injected all current and historical Debian releases into it. Results. The obtained dataset and Web portal provide both long term-views over the past 20 years of FOSS evolution and live insights on what is happening at sub-day granularity. By writing simple plugins (~100 lines of Python each) and adding them to our Debsources instance we have been able to easily replicate and extend past empirical analyses on metrics as diverse as lines of code, number of packages, and rate of change-and make them perennial. We have obtained slightly different results than our reference study, but confirmed the general trends and updated them in light of 7 extra years of evolution history. Conclusions. Debsources is a flexible platform to monitor large FOSS collections over long periods of time. Its main instance and dataset are valuable resources for scholars interested in macro-level software evolution.
AB - Context. Software evolution has been an active field of research in recent years, but studies on macro-level software evolution-i.e., on the evolution of large software collections over many years-are scarce, despite the increasing popularity of intermediate vendors as a way to deliver software to final users. Goal. We want to ease the study of both day-by-day and long-term Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) evolution trends at the macro-level, focusing on the Debian distribution as a proxy of relevant FOSS projects. Method. We have built Debsources, a software platform to gather, search, and publish on the Web all the source code of Debian and measures about it. We have set up a public Debsources instance at http://sources.debian.net, integrated it into the Debian infrastructure to receive live updates of new package releases, and written plugins to compute popular source code metrics. We have injected all current and historical Debian releases into it. Results. The obtained dataset and Web portal provide both long term-views over the past 20 years of FOSS evolution and live insights on what is happening at sub-day granularity. By writing simple plugins (~100 lines of Python each) and adding them to our Debsources instance we have been able to easily replicate and extend past empirical analyses on metrics as diverse as lines of code, number of packages, and rate of change-and make them perennial. We have obtained slightly different results than our reference study, but confirmed the general trends and updated them in light of 7 extra years of evolution history. Conclusions. Debsources is a flexible platform to monitor large FOSS collections over long periods of time. Its main instance and dataset are valuable resources for scholars interested in macro-level software evolution.
KW - debian
KW - free software
KW - open source
KW - software evolution
KW - source code
U2 - 10.1145/2652524.2652528
DO - 10.1145/2652524.2652528
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84907821127
T3 - International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
BT - International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
PB - IEEE Computer Society
Y2 - 18 September 2014 through 19 September 2014
ER -