A Repository with 44 Years of Unix Evolution

Author

Spinellis, Diomidis

Author_Institution

Dept. of Manage. Sci. & Technol., Athens Univ. of Econ. & Bus., Athens, Greece

fYear

2015

fDate

16-17 May 2015

Firstpage

462

Lastpage

465

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.

Keywords

Unix; operating system kernels; public domain software; software maintenance; GIT system; GitHub archive; Unix evolution; Unix operating system; information systems; legacy repository; line kernel system; open source FreeBSD system; software archaeology; software engineering; version-control repository; Communities; Electronic mail; History; Kernel; Licenses; Git; Unix; software archaeology; software evolution;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2015 IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on

Conference_Location

Florence

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MSR.2015.64

Filename

7180118