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Constructing universal version history

Authors:

Hung-Fu Chang,

Audris MockusAuthors Info & Claims

MSR '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories

Pages 76 - 79

https://doi.org/10.1145/1137983.1138002

Published: 22 May 2006 Publication History

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Abstract

Developers often copy code for parts or entire products to start a new product or a new release. In order to understand the software change history and to determine the code authorship, we propose to construct a universal version history from multiple version control repositories. To that end we create two practical code copy detection methods at the level of the source code file: prefix-postfix algorithm and prefix algorithm. The full pathname of a file and its version history are used to construct the universal version history of a file by linking together change histories of files that had the same code at any point in the past. The assumption of both algorithms is that developers often duplicate files by copying entire directories. Once the copying is identified we propose an algorithm to link version histories from multiple repositories in order to construct universal version history. The results show that about 41.32% of source files (in the repository involving more than 6M versions of around 2M files) were duplicated among the Avaya's source code repositories for more than ten different projects. The prefix-postfix algorithm is more suitable than prefix algorithm due to the reasonable error rates after validation of the known copying behaviors.

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Cited By

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Reid DMockus A(2023)Applying the Universal Version History Concept to Help De-Risk Copy-Based Code Reuse2023 IEEE 23rd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM59687.2023.00012(1-12)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCAM59687.2023.00012
Mockus ASpinellis DKotti ZDusing G(2020)A Complete Set of Related Git Repositories Identified via Community Detection Approaches Based on Shared CommitsProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3379597.3387499(513-517)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3379597.3387499
Amreen SBichescu BBradley RDey TMa YMockus AMousavi SZaretzki R(2019)A Methodology for Measuring FLOSS EcosystemsTowards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability10.1007/978-981-13-7099-1_1(1-29)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7099-1_1
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Index Terms

Constructing universal version history
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software post-development issues
      1. Software reverse engineering

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Published In

MSR '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories

May 2006

191 pages

ISBN:1595933972

DOI:10.1145/1137983

General Chairs:
Stephan Diehl
University Trier, Germany
,
Harald Gall
University of Zurich, Switzerland
,
Ahmed E. Hassan
Research in Motion RIM, Canada

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 May 2006

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ICSE06

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ICSE06: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 22 - 23, 2006

Shanghai, China

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Cited By

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Reid DMockus A(2023)Applying the Universal Version History Concept to Help De-Risk Copy-Based Code Reuse2023 IEEE 23rd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)10.1109/SCAM59687.2023.00012(1-12)Online publication date: 2-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCAM59687.2023.00012
Mockus ASpinellis DKotti ZDusing G(2020)A Complete Set of Related Git Repositories Identified via Community Detection Approaches Based on Shared CommitsProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3379597.3387499(513-517)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3379597.3387499
Amreen SBichescu BBradley RDey TMa YMockus AMousavi SZaretzki R(2019)A Methodology for Measuring FLOSS EcosystemsTowards Engineering Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) Ecosystems for Impact and Sustainability10.1007/978-981-13-7099-1_1(1-29)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7099-1_1
Mockus AHackbarth RPalframan JMeyer BBaresi LMezini M(2013)Risky files: an approach to focus quality improvement effortProceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2491411.2494572(691-694)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2491411.2494572
Mockus A(2009)Amassing and indexing a large sample of version control systemsProceedings of the 2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1109/MSR.2009.5069476(11-20)Online publication date: 16-May-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/MSR.2009.5069476
Chang HMockus AHassan ALanza MGodfrey M(2008)Evaluation of source code copy detection methods on freebsdProceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories10.1145/1370750.1370766(61-66)Online publication date: 10-May-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1370750.1370766
Mockus A(2007)Large-Scale Code Reuse in Open Source SoftwareProceedings of the First International Workshop on Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development10.1109/FLOSS.2007.10Online publication date: 20-May-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/FLOSS.2007.10

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