Mining the Social Web, 3rd Edition

Chapter 8. Mining GitHub: Inspecting Software Collaboration Habits, Building Interest Graphs, and More

GitHub has rapidly evolved in recent years to become the de facto social coding platform with a deceptively simple premise: provide a top-notch hosted solution for developers to create and maintain open source software projects with an open source distributed version control system called Git. Unlike version control systems such as CVS or Subversion, with Git there is no canonical copy of the code base, per se. All copies are working copies, and developers can commit local changes on a working copy without needing to be connected to a centralized server.

The distributed version control paradigm lends itself exceptionally well to GitHub’s notion of social coding because it allows developers who are interested in contributing to a project to fork a working copy of its code repository and immediately begin working on it in just the same way that the developer who owns the fork works on it. Git not only keeps track of semantics that allow repositories to be forked arbitrarily but also makes it relatively easy to merge changes from a forked child repository back into its parent repository. Through the GitHub user interface, this workflow is called a pull request.

It is a deceptively simple notion, but the ability for developers to create and collaborate on coding projects with elegant workflows that involve minimal overhead (once you understand some fundamental details about how Git ...