The Maintenance of Top Frameworks and Libraries Hosted on GitHub: An Empirical Study
Yi Huang, Xinjun Mao, Zhang Zhang · Proceedings/Proceedings of the ... International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering · 2022
The number of repositories on GitHub is huge and growing rapidly.However, most repositories are inactive, while active maintenance is essential in choosing a project.In this paper, we study the maintenance of top (i.e., most starred) frameworks and libraries hosted on GitHub, for they can be widely reused and in critical positions in the dependency network, so their maintenance status is significant.Furthermore, their maintenance practices may inspire other projects to thrive on the collaborative development platform.By investigating their adoption of recommended Open Source Software (OSS) maintenance practices and recent maintenance activities, and the association between maintenance status and usage, we find that: (1) more than 20% of the top frameworks and libraries have no commit for more than one year; (2) Some maintenance practices (e.g., codes of conduct) have relatively low adoption rates, while continuous integration has a high adoption rate of around 80%; (3) the maintenance status may have an effect on the usage frequency.