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18 million links in commit messages: purpose, evolution, and decay

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Empirical Software Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Commit messages contain diverse and valuable types of knowledge in all aspects of software maintenance and evolution. Links are an example of such knowledge. Previous work on “9.6 million links in source code comments” showed that links are prone to decay, become outdated, and lack bidirectional traceability. We conducted a large-scale study of 18,201,165 links from commits in 23,110 GitHub repositories to investigate whether they suffer the same fate. Results show that referencing external resources is prevalent and that the most frequent domains other than github.com are the external domains of Stack Overflow and Google Code. Similarly, links serve as source code context to commit messages, with inaccessible links being frequent. Although repeatedly referencing links is rare (4%), 14% of links that are prone to evolve become unavailable over time; e.g., tutorials or articles and software homepages become unavailable over time. Furthermore, we find that 70% of the distinct links suffer from decay; the domains that occur the most frequently are related to Subversion repositories. We summarize that links in commits share the same fate as links in code, opening up avenues for future work.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the Zenodo repository, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7536500.

Notes

  1. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7536500

  2. MySQL database dump 2019-02-01 from http://ghtorrent.org/downloads.html.

  3. https://github.com/sbaltes/git-log-extractor

  4. https://archive.org/help/wayback_api.php

  5. https://github.com/sbaltes/wayback-machine-retriever

  6. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/arules/index.html

  7. https://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm

  8. https://stackoverflow.com/q/1008019

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Acknowledgements

This work was inspired by the International Workshop series on Dynamic Software Documentation, held at McGill’s Bellairs Research Institute, and was supported by JSPS KAKENHI under Grants JP18H04094, JP20K19774, JP20H05706, and JP22K11970.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Ikoma, Japan

    Tao Xiao, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Takashi Ishio & Kenichi Matsumoto

  2. University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia

    Sebastian Baltes

  3. Shinshu University, Matsumoto, Japan

    Hideaki Hata

  4. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Christoph Treude

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  1. Tao Xiao
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Correspondence to Tao Xiao.

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The authors declare that Sebastian Baltes, Hideaki Hata, Christoph Treude, and Raula Gaikovina Kula are members of the EMSE Editorial Board. All co-authors have seen and agree with the contents of the manuscript and there is no financial interest to report.

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Xiao, T., Baltes, S., Hata, H. et al. 18 million links in commit messages: purpose, evolution, and decay. Empir Software Eng 28, 91 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-023-10325-8

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