Variant Forks - Motivations and Impediments
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Date
2022
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
IEEE
Abstract
Social coding platforms centred around git provide
explicit facilities to share code between projects: forks, pull
requests, cherry-picking to name but a few. Variant forks are an
interesting phenomenon in that respect, as they permit for different
projects to peacefully co-exist, yet explicitly acknowledge the
common ancestry. Several researchers analysed forking practices
on open source platforms and observed that variant forks get
created frequently. However, little is known on the motivations
for launching such a variant fork. Is it mainly technical (e.g.,
diverging features), governance (e.g., diverging interests), legal
(e.g., diverging licences), or do other factors come into play? We
report the results of an exploratory qualitative analysis on the
motivations behind creating and maintaining variant forks. We
surveyed 105 maintainers of different active open source variant
projects hosted on GitHub. Our study extends previous findings,
identifying a number of fine-grained common motivations for
launching a variant fork and listing concrete impediments for
maintaining the co-existing projects.
Description
Keywords
Mainlines, Variants, GitHub, Software ecosystems, Maintenance, Variability
Citation
Businge, J., Zerouali, A., Decan, A., Mens, T., Demeyer, S., & De Roover, C. (2022). Variant Forks - Motivations and Impediments. In Proceedings of the 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2022) (pp. 867-877). (Proceedings - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2022). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00105