email2git: A cregit Plugin to Link Reviews to Commits

Session information has not yet been published for this event.

*
Refereed Presentations
Refereed Presentation
Scheduled: Wednesday, September 13, 2017 from 11:50am – 12:35pm in Diamond 3

One Line Summary

As new kernel maintainers and developers work with a 25 year old code base, email2git helps them understand better the context in which code changes were made by linking those changes' Git commits back to their reviews.

Abstract

The Linux project’s email-based reviewing process is highly effective in filtering open source contributions on their way from mailing list discussions towards Linus’ Git repository. However, once integrated, it is difficult to link Git commits back to their review comments in mailing list discussions, especially when considering commits that underwent multiple versions (and hence review rounds), that belonged to multi-patch series or that were cherry-picked. email2git is a plugin on top of the cregit platform (https://cregit.linuxsources.org/) that uses different algorithms to match review emails to Git commits, then enables clicking on a particular token in a source code file to obtain links to relevant email discussions about the commit that introduced this token. Understanding the context of commits is helpful for new contributors to understand existing code, new maintainers in a subsystem to understand the rationale of older commits, and security experts in to understand the context around code where a vulnerability has been detected.

Tags

cregit, email2git, review, linking commits to reviews

Presentation Materials

slides
Back to list of proposals

Speakers

  • Bram Adams

    Polytechnique Montreal

    Biography

    I am an assistant professor at Polytechnique Montreal, where I head the MCIS Lab on Maintenance, Construction and Intelligence of Software. Our research interests vary from release engineering, mining software repositories and green software in particular, to software evolution and reverse-engineering in general.

  • Imgp2841

    Alexandre Courouble

    Polytechnique Montreal

    Biography

    I am currently a masters student in computer science engineering at Polytechnique Montreal. My research is in mining software repositories. I am currently mining the linux git repository.