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unknownworlds / decoda

Decoda Lua IDE and debugger
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Why the software history was not kept? #33

Closed gustavopinto closed 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 decoda, deleted their software history.

https://github.com/unknownworlds/decoda/commit/5eb2b9476c7c754d46b74ba4c2bf9b5bf0db4a8a

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 decoda 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

maxmcguire commented 8 years ago

We didn't explicitly delete the history, it just wasn't brought over when we moved the project to GitHub to make it open source (we used SVN previously). We aren't actively developing Decoda anymore, so the lack of history hasn't affected us.

gustavopinto commented 8 years ago

Thank you!

gustavopinto commented 6 years ago

Hi @maxmcguire,

thanks once again for answering our research inquiries. We were able to collect 35 responses and we drafted a research paper with the results. The paper was submitted and accepted for the 14th International Conference on Open Source Systems (http://oss2018.org/). You can find the paper here. Hope you enjoy reading the paper!

Thanks again,

Gustavo