With an average of more than 900 merges into the Linux kernel per release, many containing hundreds of commits and some containing thousands, maintenance of older versions of the kernel becomes nearly impossible. Various commercial products, such as the Android platform, run older versions of the kernel; due to security, performance, and changing hardware needs, maintainers must understand what changes (commits) are added to the current version of the kernel since the last time they inspected it to make the necessary patches. Current tools provide information about repositories through the directed acyclic graph (DAG) of the repository, which is helpful for smaller projects. However, with the scale and number of branches in the kernel, the DAG becomes overwhelming very quickly. Furthermore, the DAG contains every parents of every commit, while maintainers are more interested in how and when a commit arrives to the official Linux repository. This paper makes 3 contributions: a conversion from DAG to Merge‐Tree, an implementation of a tool built on the Merge‐Tree model, and a user study to evaluate and validate the implementation and model.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.