Year: 2020
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: 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 noncompetitive alternative to the original project.
Institution: Carnegie Mellon University
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Science Applications
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: G1837631605, G1915296078, CAREER:VARIATIONAL EXECUTION, SHF: SMALL: Streamlining Fork-Based Software Development, G4713059963, SaTC: CORE: Small: Trustworthy Dependency Management, CHS: Medium: Collaborative Research: SDI-CPR: Sustaining Digital Infrastructure as a Common Pool Resource, SHF: Small: Collaborative Research: Discerning and Recommending Context-Specific Best Practices in DevOps-Oriented Software Development, G6341933706
OpenAlex ID: W3090035558