Tracing back the history of commits in low-tech reviewing environments
Yujuan Jiang, Bram Adams, Foutse Khomh, Daniel M. Germán · 2014
Context: During software maintenance, people typically go back to the original reviews of a patch to understand the actual design rationale and potential risks of the code. Whereas modern web-based reviewing environments like gerrit make this process relatively easy, the low-tech, mailing-list based reviewing environments of many open source systems make linking a commit back to its reviews and earlier versions far from trivial, since (1) a commit has no physical link with any reviewing email, (2) the discussed patches are not always fully identical to the accepted commits and (3) some discussions last across multiple email threads, each of which containing potentially multiple versions of the same patch.