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caelum / mamute

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http://www.mamute.org/
Apache License 2.0
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Why the software history was not kept? #278

Open gustavopinto opened 8 years ago

gustavopinto commented 8 years ago

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 mamute, deleted their software history.

https://github.com/caelum/mamute/commit/0160ce722b63dd5580c4d372fc7c790377c9291f

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 mamute 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

gustavopinto commented 8 years ago

When revisiting this issue, I thought that this first commit was introducing a kind of scaffold necessary to set up the project. If that is the case, this project did not delete the history. Am I correct?

gustavopinto commented 8 years ago

hi @leocwolter, do you have any comments on this issue?

hugoroger commented 7 years ago

Are you its deleted @gustavopinto ?