Why the software history was not kept?

[gustavopinto]

Hi there,

I'm a researcher studying software evolution. As part of my current research, I'm studying the implications of open-sourcing a proprietary software, for instance, if the project succeed in attracting newcomers. Caravel was in my list. However, I observed that the software history of when the software was developed as a proprietary software was not kept after the transition to Github.

Knowing that software history is indispensable for developers (e.g., developers need to refer to history several times a day), I would like to ask Caravel developers the following four brief questions:

1. Why did you decide to not keep the software history?
2. Do the core developers faced any kind of problems, when trying to refer to the old history? If so, how did they solve these problems?
3. Do the newcomers faced any kind of problems, when trying to refer to the old history? If so, how did they solve these problems?
4. How does the lack of history impacted on software evolution? Does it placed any burden in understanding and evolving the software?

Thanks in advance for your collaboration,

Gustavo Pinto, PhD
http://www.gustavopinto.org

[mistercrunch]

The software pretty much started as open source. No commit history was ever deleted or truncated.

1. False
2. Doesn't apply
3. Doesn't apply
4. Doesn't apply

[gustavopinto]

Hi @mistercrunch,

thanks once again for answering our research inquiries. We were able to collect 35 responses and we drafted a research paper with the results. The paper was submitted and accepted for the 14th International Conference on Open Source Systems (http://oss2018.org/). You can find the paper here. Hope you enjoy reading the paper!

Thanks again,

Gustavo