What Is the Gist? Understanding the Use of Public Gists on GitHub

Wang, Weiliang; Poo-Caamaño, Germán; Wilde, Evan; Germán, Daniel M.

doi:10.1109/msr.2015.36

Cited by 13 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…• Understanding the Python community's use of gists: Wang et al [5] studied the use of Public gists on GitHub, observing a variety of uses, but did not focus on usage categories per language or file type. We observed several different usage patterns for Python gists in the Gistable database.…”

Section: Future Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gistable: Evaluating the Executability of Python Code Snippets on GitHub

Horton

Parnin

2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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Software developers create and share code online to demonstrate programming language concepts and programming tasks. Code snippets can be a useful way to explain and demonstrate a programming concept, but may not always be directly executable. A code snippet can contain parse errors, or fail to execute if the environment contains unmet dependencies.This paper presents an empirical analysis of the executable status of Python code snippets shared through the GitHub gist system, and the ability of developers familiar with software configuration to correctly configure and run them. We find that 75.6% of gists require non-trivial configuration to overcome missing dependencies, configuration files, reliance on a specific operating system, or some other environment configuration. Our study also suggests the natural assumption developers make about resource names when resolving configuration errors is correct less than half the time.We also present Gistable, a database and extensible framework built on GitHub's gist system, which provides executable code snippets to enable reproducible studies in software engineering. Gistable contains 10,259 code snippets, approximately 5,000 with a Dockerfile to configure and execute them without import error. Gistable is publicly available at https://github.com/gistable/gistable.Another developer had difficult working with a cloud provider package.Couldn't find clouddns module. Couldn't solve dependency. Spent 2 hours on it.

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Section: Future Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gistable: Evaluating the Executability of Python Code Snippets on GitHub

Horton

Parnin

2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)

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“…Code snippets are commonly used by developers to provide API documentation [1] and act as examples for learning and reuse [2], [3], [4]. Stack Overflow, a question and answer site for developers, has over 1M questions relating to Python, a popular and fast growing programming language [2]. On GitHub's gist system, developers have shared over 300K public Python code snippets [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

V2: Fast Detection of Configuration Drift in Python

Horton

Parnin

2019

2019 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)

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Code snippets are prevalent, but are hard to reuse because they often lack an accompanying environment configuration. Most are not actively maintained, allowing for drift between the most recent possible configuration and the code snippet as the snippet becomes out-of-date over time. Recent work has identified the problem of validating and detecting out-of-date code snippets as the most important consideration for code reuse. However, determining if a snippet is correct, but simply out-of-date, is a non-trivial task. In the best case, breaking changes are well documented, allowing developers to manually determine when a code snippet contains an out-of-date API usage. In the worst case, determining if and when a breaking change was made requires an exhaustive search through previous dependency versions.We present V2, a strategy for determining if a code snippet is out-of-date by detecting discrete instances of configuration drift, where the snippet uses an API which has since undergone a breaking change. Each instance of configuration drift is classified by a failure encountered during validation and a configuration patch, consisting of dependency version changes, which fixes the underlying fault. V2 uses feedback-directed search to explore the possible configuration space for a code snippet, reducing the number of potential environment configurations that need to be validated. When run on a corpus of public Python snippets from prior research, V2 identifies 248 instances of configuration drift.

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“…Also, some researchers investigated other features and tools of GitHub, eg, forking, starring, watching, and Gists . Specifically, Jiang et al explored the forking in GitHub and found that forking is mainly used for making contributions of original repositories, and it is beneficial for OSS community.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They found that a subset of project watchers begin contributing to the project, and those contributors account for a significant percentage of contributors on the project. Wang et al studied how developers are using Gists in GitHub and found that Gists are used by a small portion of GitHub developers, and those that use them typically only have a few.…”

Section: Preliminariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

GitHub's milestone tool: A mixed‐methods analysis on its use

Zhang

Wang

et al. 2019

J Software Evolu Process

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Social coding site GitHub provides developers with many management tools to facilitate project maintenance and developer collaboration. Milestone tool, in particular, plays an important role in organizing and tracking progress on groups of issues or pull requests in a project. However, few research has analyzed the milestone tool, even though it has been used in practice for a long time. In this paper, we want to address this literature gap and present an ongoing work aimed at investigating the use of the milestone tool in GitHub open‐source projects. We conduct a mixed‐methods analysis in a large‐scale dataset of GitHub projects, to help developers gain some insights into the milestone tool, including its usage, benefits, and limitations. We quantitatively investigate the basic adoption of milestone tool and its correlation with project properties. We also survey developers to understand the reasons for using milestone tool or not and their perceptions of the milestone tool. We find that certain types of projects use milestone tool more than others. Adopting the milestone tool is associated with more commits, more releases, and more project popularity, but the current milestone tool also has some limitations. These observations can then be forwarded to the GitHub community for follow‐up and can result in them potentially making a better milestone tool.

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What Is the Gist? Understanding the Use of Public Gists on GitHub

Cited by 13 publications

References 12 publications

Gistable: Evaluating the Executability of Python Code Snippets on GitHub

Gistable: Evaluating the Executability of Python Code Snippets on GitHub

V2: Fast Detection of Configuration Drift in Python

GitHub's milestone tool: A mixed‐methods analysis on its use

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