How Has Forking Changed in the Last 20 Years? A Study of Hard Forks on GitHub
How Has Forking Changed in the Last 20 Years? A Study of Hard Forks on GitHub
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DOI：
10.1145/3377811.3380412
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发表时间：
2020-06
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Shurui Zhou;Bogdan Vasilescu;Christian Kästner
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Shurui Zhou;Bogdan Vasilescu;Christian Kästner
随着分布式版本控制系统和社交编码环境（如 GitHub）的兴起，分叉的概念已经发生了变化。传统上分叉是指分裂出一个独立的开发分支（我们称之为硬分叉）；对硬分叉的研究主要是在 GitHub 出现之前进行的，表明硬分叉通常被认为是至关重要的，因为它们可能会分裂社区。如今，在社交编码环境中，鼓励开源开发人员分叉一个项目，以便为社区做出贡献（我们称之为社交分叉），这也可能影响了围绕硬分叉的看法和实践。为了重新审视硬分叉，我们在 GitHub 上识别、研究和分类了 15,306 个硬分叉，并采访了 18 位硬分叉或分叉存储库的所有者。我们发现，除其他外，硬分叉通常是从社会分叉演变而来，而不是有意计划的，而且人们对硬分叉的看法确实发生了巨大变化，将它们视为原始项目的积极的非竞争性替代方案。
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 coding environments, open-source developers are encouraged to fork a project in order to contribute 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.