How Has Forking Changed in the Last 20 Years? A Study of Hard Forks on GitHubTechnical
The notion of forking has changed with the rise of distributed version control systems and social coding environments, like GitHub. Traditionally forking refers to splitting off an independent development branch (which we call hard forks); research on hard forks, conducted mostly in pre-GitHub days showed that hard forks were often seen critical as they may fragment a community. Today, in social forking environments, open-source developers are encouraged to fork a project in order to integrate contributions to the community (which we call social forks), which may have also influenced perceptions and practices around hard forks. To revisit hard forks, we identify, study and classify 15,306 hard forks on GitHub and interview 18 owners of hard forks or forked repositories. We find that, among others, hard forks often evolve out of social forks rather than being planned deliberately and that perception about hard forks have indeed changed dramatically, seeing them often as a positive non-competitive alternative to the original project.
Sat 11 JulDisplayed time zone: (UTC) Coordinated Universal Time change
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01:05 8mTalk | Studying the Impact of Noises in Build Breakage DataJ1 Journal First Taher A Ghaleb Queen's University, Daniel Alencar Da Costa University of Otago, Ying Zou Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Ahmed E. Hassan Queen's University Link to publication DOI Pre-print | ||
01:13 12mTalk | Taming Behavioral Backward Incompatibilities via Cross-Project Testing and AnalysisTechnical Technical Papers Lingchao Chen The University of Texas at Dallas, Foyzul Hassan University of Texas at San Antonio, USA, Xiaoyin Wang University of Texas at San Antonio, USA, Lingming Zhang The University of Texas at Dallas | ||
01:25 12mTalk | Watchman: Monitoring Dependency Conflicts for Python Library Ecosystem Technical Papers Ying Wang Northeastern University, China, Ming Wen Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, Yepang Liu Southern University of Science and Technology, Yibo Wang Northeastern University, Zhenming Li Northeastern University, Chao Wang University of Southern California, Hai Yu Northeastern University, China, Shing-Chi Cheung Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Chang Xu Nanjing University, Zhiliang Zhu Northeastern University, China | ||
01:37 12mTalk | How Has Forking Changed in the Last 20 Years? A Study of Hard Forks on GitHubTechnical Technical Papers Shurui Zhou Carnegie Mellon University, USA / University of Toronto, CA, Bogdan Vasilescu Carnegie Mellon University, Christian Kästner Carnegie Mellon University Pre-print | ||