Hi there,
I'm a researcher studying software evolution. As part of my current research, I'm studying the implications of open-sourcing a proprietary software, for instance, if the project succeed in attracting newcomers. However, I observed that some projects, like _textmate_, deleted their software history.
https://github.com/textmate/textmate/commit/9894969e677c39007c2860f09e3f8235...
Knowing that software history is indispensable for developers (e.g., developers need to refer to history several times a day), I would like to ask textmate developers the following four brief questions:
1. Why did you decide to not keep the software history? 2. Do the core developers faced any kind of problems, when trying to refer to the old history? If so, how did they solve these problems? 3. Do the newcomers faced any kind of problems, when trying to refer to the old history? If so, how did they solve these problems? 4. How does the lack of history impacted on software evolution? Does it placed any burden in understanding and evolving the software?
Thanks in advance for your collaboration,
Gustavo Pinto, PhD http://www.gustavopinto.org
On 21 Jul 2016, at 22:10, Gustavo Henrique Lima Pinto wrote:
[…] I would like to ask textmate developers the following four brief questions:
- Why did you decide to not keep the software history?
I think the question should be rephrased as “Why did you decide not to make your full development history public?”
The full history is a time stamped log of all my activity going back years and also show commits from people who may have written commit messages, code comments, or similar that they never intended to be made public, so I did not feel I could make it public without reviewing all of it and also getting the permission from former participants.
So not worth it for me going through such review process for a hypothetical future situation, after all, I still do have the full history, so I still have the option of releasing it (should I feel it would be useful), and a contributor can always ask me, if they have questions that require looking at the private history.
- Do the core developers faced any kind of problems, when trying to
refer to the old history? If so, how did they solve these problems?
Not sure how you define “core developers”. I am the core developer, and I still have the private history. I have used it a handful of times since the open source release.
- Do the newcomers faced any kind of problems, when trying to refer
to the old history? If so, how did they solve these problems?
My guess would be no, but someone else will need to answer this. Based on commits the top five committers are:
- Ronald Wampler - Jacob Bandes-Storch - Boris Dušek - Adam Strzelecki - Joachim Mårtensson
At least some of them should be on this list.
- How does the lack of history impacted on software evolution? Does
it placed any burden in understanding and evolving the software?
I think history is more about bug fixing, figuring out when buggy code was introduced or why seemingly wrong/redundant code was added, and that task probably mostly falls on me.
Also, with a few exceptions, this part is mostly concerned with the last few commits done to the code being reviewed, e.g. if in next build something misbehaves and a contributor decides to look into why, they do not need the history from four years ago, but simply what has changed in the last build and why.
Kind regards Allan
-
Allan Odgaard -
Gustavo Henrique Lima Pinto