The Linux project's email-based reviewing process is highly effective in filtering open source contributions on their way from mailing list discussions towards Linus' Git repository. However, once integrated, it is difficult to link Git commits back to their review comments in mailing list discussions, especially when considering commits that underwent multiple versions (and hence review rounds), that belonged to multi-patch series or that were cherry-picked. email2git is a plugin on top of the cregit platform (https://cregit.linuxsources.org/) that uses different algorithms to match review emails to Git commits, then enables clicking on a particular token in a source code file to obtain links to relevant email discussions about the commit that introduced this token. Understanding the context of commits is helpful for new contributors to understand existing code, new maintainers in a subsystem to understand the rationale of older commits, and security experts in to understand the context around code where a vulnerability has been detected.
Alexandre is a Master’s student working under the supervision of Dr. Bram Adams at Polytechnique Montreal. As a part of his degree, he is working on email2git and on a research project aiming at measuring linux developers’ expertise using dedicated metrics. Alex gave a related... Read More →
