Same File, Different Changes: The Potential of Meta-Maintenance on GitHub

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of meta-maintenance on GitHub, analyzing how shared files evolve across repositories to identify opportunities for improved maintenance and updates.

Contribution

It introduces the novel concept of meta-maintenance and provides an exploratory analysis of shared file evolution across multiple repositories and languages.

Findings

Most active repositories contain shared files.

A significant minority of shared files are maintained differently.

Meta-maintenance has strong potential for improving code upkeep.

Abstract

Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining these shared files is important, especially for keeping the most up-to-date version of reused code. Different to related work, we propose the concept of meta-maintenance -- i.e., tracking how the same files evolve in different repositories with the aim to provide useful maintenance opportunities to those files. We conduct an exploratory study by analyzing repositories from seven different programming languages to explore the potential of meta-maintenance. Our results indicate that a majority of active repositories on GitHub contains at least one file which is also present in another repository, and that a significant minority of these files are maintained differently in the different repositories which contain them. We manually analyzed a representative sample of shared files and their variants to understand which changes might be useful for meta-maintenance. Our findings support the potential of meta-maintenance and open up avenues for future work to capitalize on this potential.