Forking and pull requests have been widely used in open-source communities as a uniform development and contribution mechanism, giving developers the flexibility to modify their own fork without affecting others before attempting to contribute back. However, not all projects use forks efficiently; many experience lost and duplicate contributions and fragmented communities. In this paper, we explore how open-source projects on GitHub differ with regard to forking inefficiencies. First, we observed that different communities experience these inefficiencies to widely different degrees and interviewed practitioners to understand why. Then, using multiple regression modeling, we analyzed which context factors correlate with fewer inefficiencies.We found that better modularity and centralized management are associated with more contributions and a higher fraction of accepted pull requests, suggesting specific best practices that project maintainers can adopt to reduce forking-related inefficiencies in their communities.
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How Has Forking Changed in the Last 20 Years? A Study of Hard Forks on GitHub
The notion of forking has changed with the rise of distributed ver-
sion control systems and social coding environments, like GitHub.
Traditionally forking refers to splitting off an independent devel-
opment 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 so-
cial 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 non-
competitive alternative to the original project.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1813598
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10180334
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 445-456
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3377811.3380412
