A Study of Backporting Code in Open-Source Software for Characterizing Changesets
Pages 296 - 297
Abstract
The software development process, shaped by stakeholder feedback, encompasses the creation of diverse versions tailored for customization and addressing hardware limitations. Maintaining these versions involves initiating the transfer of changes for reuse. In the context of a pull-based development model, where the development branch remains current, the term "backporting" is coined to sustain stable versions. Stability requirements may necessitate fewer changes, compatible modifications, or security checks. Consequently, we conducted an analysis of 37,460 backports from 223,602 pull requests in open-source GitHub projects, aiming to identify types of incompatibilities encountered in real-life scenarios. We manually pinpointed various reasons why pull requests may lack compatibility with other versions, including contextual differences, varying dependencies, and statement-level alterations. This study constitutes the inaugural comprehensive characterization of changesets during the porting process across different versions with incompatibilities. The acquired insights can serve as a foundation for automated slicing and adaptation of changesets in stable software versions.
References
[1]
Debasish Chakroborti, Kevin A. Schneider, and Chanchal K. Roy. Backports: Change types, challenges and strategies. In Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension, ICPC '22, page 636--647, New York, NY, USA, 2022. Association for Computing Machinery.
[2]
Baishakhi Ray and Miryung Kim. A case study of cross-system porting in forked projects. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE '12, New York, NY, USA, 2012. Association for Computing Machinery.
[3]
T. Hoang, J. Lawall, Y. Tian, R. J. Oentaryo, and D. Lo. Patchnet: Hierarchical deep learning-based stable patch identification for the linux kernel. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, pages 1--1, 2019.
[4]
Baishakhi Ray, Miryung Kim, Suzette Person, and Neha Rungta. Detecting and characterizing semantic inconsistencies in ported code. In 2013 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), pages 367--377, 2013.
[5]
Julia Lawall, Derek Palinski, Lukas Gnirke, and Gilles Muller. Fast and precise retrieval of forward and back porting information for linux device drivers. In Proceedings of the 2017 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference, USENIX ATC '17, page 15--26, USA, 2017. USENIX Association.
[6]
Daniel M. German, Massimiliano Di Penta, Yann-Gael Gueheneuc, and Giuliano Antoniol. Code siblings: Technical and legal implications of copying code between applications. In 2009 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, pages 81--90, 2009.
[7]
D. Chakroborti, K. Schneider, and C. Roy. Reback: Recommending backports in social coding environments. Journal of Automated Software Engineering, ASE-24:e-page-number, 2024.
[8]
Luyao Ren. Automated patch porting across forked projects. In Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2019, page 1199--1201, New York, NY, USA, 2019. Association for Computing Machinery.
Recommendations
Backports: change types, challenges and strategies
ICPC '22: Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program ComprehensionSource code repositories allow developers to manage multiple versions (or branches) of a software system. Pull-requests are used to modify a branch, and backporting is a regular activity used to port changes from a current development branch to other ...
The Lives and Deaths of Open Source Code Forges
OpenSym '17: Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Open CollaborationCode forges are third party software repositories that also provide various tools and facilities for distributed software development teams to use, including source code control systems, mailing lists and communication forums, bug tracking systems, web ...
Open source software licenses: Strong-copyleft, non-copyleft, or somewhere in between?
Studies on open source software (OSS) have shown that the license under which an OSS is released has an impact on the success or failure of the software. In this paper, we model the relationship between an OSS developer's utility, the effort that goes ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
April 2024
531 pages
ISBN:9798400705021
DOI:10.1145/3639478
- Co-chairs:
- Ana Paiva,
- Rui Abreu,
- Program Co-chairs:
- Abhik Roychoudhury,
- Margaret Storey
Copyright © 2024 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
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 the author(s) 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].
Sponsors
In-Cooperation
- Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 23 May 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Short-paper
Funding Sources
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF)
Conference
ICSE-Companion '24
Sponsor:
ICSE-Companion '24: 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
April 14 - 20, 2024
Lisbon, Portugal
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%
Upcoming Conference
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 54Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)54
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6
Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in