TY - GEN
T1 - Understanding the Archived Projects on GitHub
AU - Xia, Xiaoya
AU - Zhao, Shengyu
AU - Zhang, Xinran
AU - Lou, Zehua
AU - Wang, Wei
AU - Bi, Fenglin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 IEEE.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Open source software (OSS) on GitHub is experiencing continued growth and a rapid rise in the creation of projects. As OSS evolved, numerous projects faced decline, with some inevitably degrading into unmaintained status and getting archived by the owners. Understanding the deprecated projects helps deepen the perception of OSS maintenance and evolution. This paper describes the study of 361 popular GitHub projects that have been archived. By reading repository READMEs and sending surveys to project maintainers, we found the software repositories were archived due to being transferred, evolved, or unmaintained. We provide a set of 16 reasons and 10 practices to describe why and how these projects were archived. We further reveal the OSS development activity lifecycle patterns by fitting their commit history curves. We also confirmed the importance of the bus factor risk that would influence the sustainability of open source projects. Archiving a software repository is an explicit indication of repository deprecation. By providing the reason (the why), the strategy (the how), and the lifecycle patterns (the what) of the archived projects, we bring implications and practices that promote the health and sustainability of open source projects and the ecosystem overall.
AB - Open source software (OSS) on GitHub is experiencing continued growth and a rapid rise in the creation of projects. As OSS evolved, numerous projects faced decline, with some inevitably degrading into unmaintained status and getting archived by the owners. Understanding the deprecated projects helps deepen the perception of OSS maintenance and evolution. This paper describes the study of 361 popular GitHub projects that have been archived. By reading repository READMEs and sending surveys to project maintainers, we found the software repositories were archived due to being transferred, evolved, or unmaintained. We provide a set of 16 reasons and 10 practices to describe why and how these projects were archived. We further reveal the OSS development activity lifecycle patterns by fitting their commit history curves. We also confirmed the importance of the bus factor risk that would influence the sustainability of open source projects. Archiving a software repository is an explicit indication of repository deprecation. By providing the reason (the why), the strategy (the how), and the lifecycle patterns (the what) of the archived projects, we bring implications and practices that promote the health and sustainability of open source projects and the ecosystem overall.
KW - Open Source Governance
KW - Software Deprecation
KW - Software Evolution
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85160549114
U2 - 10.1109/SANER56733.2023.00012
DO - 10.1109/SANER56733.2023.00012
M3 - 会议稿件
AN - SCOPUS:85160549114
T3 - Proceedings - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2023
SP - 13
EP - 24
BT - Proceedings - 2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2023
A2 - Zhang, Tao
A2 - Xia, Xin
A2 - Novielli, Nicole
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 30th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2023
Y2 - 21 March 2023 through 24 March 2023
ER -