An analysis of Java release practices on GitHub
V.C. Roest (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
S. Proksch – Mentor (TU Delft - Software Engineering)
C.B. Poulsen – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Programming Languages)
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Abstract
This paper examines the release practices of Java Maven Repositories on GitHub. Most prior research in this vein has been done on Maven Central, the largest Maven package repository. However, GitHub hosts 15.5 million Java repositories, and is left untapped. Additionally of interest is the fact that GitHub provides a competitor to Maven Central, GitHub packages. To this end, the paper establishes an index of all Java repositories on GitHub. Furthermore, this dataset also includes Maven configuration (POM.xml) files. Additionally, an in-depth analysis is done of a sample of 500 000 of those 15.5 million repositories. This sample ended up containing 170 798 Java Maven repositories that had those POM.xml files. In this sample we discovered that of those 170 798, 6 507 (≈ 3.8%) had set up distribution configuration. Maven Central ended up being the most popular but GitHub packages and others ended up being quite popular as well. In the external repositories configured in those Java projects we notice a distinct lack of GitHub packages, other repositories were still present. We theorize that the lower popularity of GitHub packages is because it requires authentication, which is not trivial to set up. We discuss several approaches that can improve this situation.