计算机科学

计算机科学 ›› 2023, Vol. 50 ›› Issue (6A): 220600221-8.doi: 10.11896/jsjkx.220600221

• 软件&交叉 • 上一篇    下一篇

开源软件中社区文档应用与维护的实证研究

张禹1, 王哲2, 李志星1, 余跃1, 王涛1, 蔡孟栾1   

  1. 1 国防科技大学计算机学院 长沙 410000;
    2 清华大学公共管理学院 北京 100084
  • 出版日期:2023-06-10 发布日期:2023-06-12
  • 通讯作者: 李志星(lizhixing15@nudt.edu.cn)
  • 作者简介:(zhangyu_@nudt.edu.cn)
  • 基金资助:
    基于群智范式的泛在操作系统开源生态构建、治理及安全评估研究(62141209)

Empirical Study on Application and Maintenance of OSS Community Profile Documentation

ZHANG Yu1, WANG Zhe2, LI Zhixing1, YU Yue1, WANG Tao1, CAI Mengluan1   

  1. 1 College of Computer Science and Technology,National University of Defense Technology,Changsha 410000,China;
    2 School of Public Policy and Management,Tsinghua University,Beijing 100084,China
  • Online:2023-06-10 Published:2023-06-12
  • About author:ZHANG Yu,born in 1995,postgra-duate.Her main research interests include software engineering,data mining,and knowledge graph in open source communities. LI Zhixing ,born in 1992,assistant professor.His main research interests include software engineering,data mi-ning,and knowledge discovering in open source communities.
  • Supported by:
    Research on Open Source Ecosystem Construction,Governance and Security Assessment of Ubiquitous Operating System based on Crowd Intelligence Paradigm(62141209).

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摘要： 社区文档对开源软件的开发和和管理具有重要意义,虽然已有部分研究对社区文档的内容进行了初步分析,但是社区文档在开源软件中的实际应用情况以及开发者对社区文档的维护实践尚未得到充分研究。为填补这一空白,通过量化分析手段探索了社区文档的应用和维护现状。首先随机收集了托管于GitHub平台上近2000个开源项目的社区文档数据,分析了编程语言、项目所有者类型、项目成长期和项目社区规模等多个因素对社区文档应用的影响。与此同时,从文档位置、创建延迟、维护者、更新频率和更新原因多个方面分析了社区文档的维护实践。研究结果表明,README文档和LICENSE文档比CONTRIBUTING,CONDUCT和TEMPLATE文档具有更高的应用普及率和更早的应用时间。此外,社区文档在TypeScript语言的项目、大规模社区的项目以及组织所拥有的项目中的应用更为普遍。就文档位置而言,社区文档常被放置于项目的根目录中,由开发者中的小部分成员出于完善性和适应性需求,对文档进行低频率的更新和维护。本研究有助于增强开源软件开发者和使用者对社区文档应用和维护实践的了解,引导开源软件社区的健康发展。

关键词: 开源软件, 社区文档, 文档普及, 文档维护, GitHub

Abstract: Community profile documentation is crucial for the establishment and management of open source software(OSS) communities.Although prior research has conducted content analysis of community profile documentation,little is known about how common it is in practice and how it is maintained by OSS practitioners.We aim at complementing the current understanding of community profile documentation by providing a quantitative description of its prevalence and maintenance.We randomly collect 2000 OSS projects from GitHub,based on which we study the documentation popularity by programming language,repository owner type,repository age,and community size,respectively.We also investigate the maintenance practice of community profile documentation in terms of location,creation latency,maintainers,update frequency and change-triggering events,respectively.The README and LICENSE documentation is far more popular and created earlier than the CONTRIBUTING,CONDUCT and TEMPLATE documentation in GitHub OSS projects.Community profile documentation is more likely to be found in repositories of TypeScript,repositories of larger community size,and repositories owned by organizations.Community profile documentation is mainly placed in the root directory and changed by a small group of developers with a low frequency of update,which is mostly driven by perfective and adaptive requirements.

Key words: Open source software, Community profile documentation, Documentation prevalence, Documentation maintenance, GitHub

中图分类号: 

  • TP311
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