[TUHS] A repository with 44 years of Unix evolution gets the MSR '15 Best Data Showcase Award

[Clem Cole]

Diomidis,

What a wonderful gift to the community.   Thank you.

Clem Cole

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 4:07 PM, Diomidis Spinellis <dds at aueb.gr> wrote:

> Since early 2013 I've occasionally asked this list for help, and shared
> the progress regarding the creation of a Unix Git repository containing
> Unix releases from the 1970s until today [1].
>
> On Saturday I presented this work [2, 3] at MSR '15: The 12th Working
> Conference on Mining Software Repositories, and on Sunday I discussed
> the work with the participants over a poster [4] (complete with commits
> shown in a teletype (lcase) and a VT-220 font).  Amazingly, the work
> received the conference's "Best Data Showcase Award", for which I'm
> obviously very happy.
>
> I'd like to thank again the many individuals who contributed to the
> effort. Brian W. Kernighan, Doug McIlroy, and Arnold D. Robbins helped
> with Bell Labs login identifiers. Clem Cole, Era Eriksson, Mary Ann
> Horton, Kirk McKusick, Jeremy C. Reed, Ingo Schwarze, and Anatole Shaw
> helped with BSD login identifiers. The BSD SCCS import code is based on
> work by H. Merijn Brand and Jonathan Gray.
>
> A lot of work remains to be done.  Given that the build process is
> shared as open source code, it is easy to contribute additions and fixes
> through GitHub pull requests on the build software repository [5], but
> if you feel uncomfortable with that, just send me email. The most useful
> community contribution would be to increase the coverage of imported
> snapshot files that are attributed to a specific author. Currently,
> about 90 thousand files (out of a total of 160 thousand) are getting
> assigned an author through a default rule. Similarly, there are about
> 250 authors (primarily early FreeBSD ones) for which only the identifier
> is known. Both are listed in the build repository's unmatched directory
> [6], and contributions are welcomed (start with early editions; I can
> propagate from there). Most importantly, more branches of open source
> systems can be added, such as NetBSD OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, and illumos.
> Ideally, current right holders of other important historical Unix
> releases, such as System III, System V, NeXTSTEP, and SunOS, will
> release their systems under a license that would allow their
> incorporation into this repository.  If you know people who can help in
> this, please nudge them.
>
> --Diomidis
>
> [1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
> [2]
>
> http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.html
> (HTML)
> [3]
> http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.pdf
> (PDF)
> [4]
> http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/poster.pdf
> (105MB)
> [5] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make
> [6]
> https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make/tree/master/src/unmatched
>
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