How Distributed Version Control Systems impact open source software projects

Author

Rodríguez-Bustos, Christian ; Aponte, Jairo

Author_Institution

Dept. de Ing. de Sist. e Ind., Univ. Nac. de Colombia, Bogota, Colombia

fYear

2012

fDate

2-3 June 2012

Firstpage

36

Lastpage

39

Abstract

Centralized Version Control Systems have been used by many open source projects for a long time. However, in recent years several widely-known projects have migrated their repositories to Distributed Version Control Systems, such as Mercurial, Bazaar, and Git. Such systems have technical features that allow contributors to work in new ways, as various different workflows are possible. We plan to study this migration process to assess how developers´ organization and their contributions are affected. As a first step, we present an analysis of the Mozilla repositories, which migrated from CVS to Mercurial in 2007. This analysis reveals both expected and unexpected aspects of the contributors´ activities.

Keywords

configuration management; distributed processing; project management; public domain software; Bazaar; CVS; Git; Mercurial; Mozilla repositories; centralized version control system; distributed version control system; migration process; open source software project; Communities; Control systems; Data mining; History; Merging; Open source software; Contribution measuring; Distributed Version Control System; Mining Software Repositories; Mozilla; Open Source Software;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2012 9th IEEE Working Conference on

Conference_Location

Zurich

ISSN

2160-1852

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1760-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MSR.2012.6224297

Filename

6224297