A repository with 44 years of Unix evolution

Diomidis Spinellis*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

13 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The evolution of the Unix operating system is made available as a version-control repository, covering the period from its inception in 1972 as a five thousand line kernel, to 2015 as a widely-used 26 million line system. The repository contains 659 thousand commits and 2306 merges. The repository employs the commonly used Git system for its storage, and is hosted on the popular GitHub archive. It has been created by synthesizing with custom software 24 snapshots of systems developed at Bell Labs, Berkeley University, and the 386BSD team, two legacy repositories, and the modern repository of the open source FreeBSD system. In total, 850 individual contributors are identified, the early ones through primary research. The data set can be used for empirical research in software engineering, information systems, and software archaeology.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2015
PublisherIEEE
Pages462-465
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9780769555942
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 4 Aug 2015
Externally publishedYes
Event12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2015 - Florence, Italy
Duration: 16 May 201517 May 2015

Publication series

NameIEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
Volume2015-August
ISSN (Print)2160-1852
ISSN (Electronic)2160-1860

Conference

Conference12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2015
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityFlorence
Period16/05/1517/05/15

Keywords

  • Git
  • Software archaeology
  • Software evolution
  • Unix

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