The Software Heritage Filesystem (SwhFS): Integrating Source Code Archival with Development

TL;DR

The paper presents SwhFS, a user-space filesystem that seamlessly integrates the Software Heritage archive with development workflows, enabling quick access to vast source code history without cloning.

Contribution

It introduces SwhFS, a novel filesystem that provides unified, efficient access to large-scale software archives across different VCS systems for developers.

Findings

Enables checkout of 2 billion commits without cloning.

Works across multiple VCS technologies and repositories.

Provides access to various source code artifacts as if local.

Abstract

We introduce the Software Heritage filesystem (SwhFS), a user-space filesystem that integrates large-scale open source software archival with development workflows. SwhFS provides a POSIX filesystem view of Software Heritage, the largest public archive of software source code and version control system (VCS) development history.Using SwhFS, developers can quickly "checkout" any of the 2 billion commits archived by Software Heritage, even after they disappear from their previous known location and without incurring the performance cost of repository cloning. SwhFS works across unrelated repositories and different VCS technologies. Other source code artifacts archived by Software Heritage-individual source code files and trees, releases, and branches-can also be accessed using common programming tools and custom scripts, as if they were locally available.A screencast of SwhFS is available online at dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4531411.