01-07-2023
18 million links in commit messages: purpose, evolution, and decay
Published in: Empirical Software Engineering | Issue 4/2023
Log inActivate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.
Select sections of text to find matching patents with Artificial Intelligence. powered by
Select sections of text to find additional relevant content using AI-assisted search. powered by
Abstract
github.com
are the external domains of Stack Overflow
and Google Code
. Similarly, links serve as source code context to commit messages, with inaccessible links being frequent. Although repeatedly referencing links is rare (4%), 14% of links that are prone to evolve become unavailable over time; e.g., tutorials or articles and software homepages become unavailable over time. Furthermore, we find that 70% of the distinct links suffer from decay; the domains that occur the most frequently are related to Subversion repositories. We summarize that links in commits share the same fate as links in code, opening up avenues for future work.