Hi,
I have been developing my git tool (based on the git internal API) that
can find out all the commits that have changed a line for better
authorship.
The reason is for my binary code authorship research, I use machine
learning to classify code authorship. To produce training data, I start
with a source code repository with well-known author labels for each line
and then compiling the project into binary. So, I am able to know the
authorship for binary code and then apply some machine learning
techniques.
To get ground truth of authorship for each line, I start with git-blame.
But later I find this is not sufficient because the last commit may only
add comments or may only change a small part of the line, so that I
shouldn't attribute the line of code to the last author. Of course, there
must be some debates on who can be the representative of a line of code.
So what I would like to do is find out all the commits that have ever
changed a line, then I can try different approaches to summarize over all
these commits to produce my final authorship label (or even tuple).
I was wondering whether there have been similar debates over accurate
authorship in this community before and whether there may be other people
interested in this work.
Thanks
--Xiaozhu
From: <redacted>
I have been developing my git tool (based on the git internal API)
that
can find out all the commits that have changed a line for better
authorship.
The reason is for my binary code authorship research, I use machine
learning to classify code authorship. To produce training data, I
start
with a source code repository with well-known author labels for each
line
and then compiling the project into binary. So, I am able to know the
authorship for binary code and then apply some machine learning
techniques.
To get ground truth of authorship for each line, I start with
git-blame.
But later I find this is not sufficient because the last commit may
only
add comments or may only change a small part of the line, so that I
shouldn't attribute the line of code to the last author.
I would suggest there is:
- White space adjustment
- Comment or documentation (assumes you can parse the 'code' to decide
that it isn't executable code)
- word changes within expressions
- complete replacement of line (whole statement?)
Custom & practice is the likely decider.
Of course, there
must be some debates on who can be the representative of a line of
code.
So what I would like to do is find out all the commits that have ever
changed a line, then I can try different approaches to summarize over
all
these commits to produce my final authorship label (or even tuple).
I was wondering whether there have been similar debates over accurate
authorship in this community before and whether there may be other
people
interested in this work.
I'd suggest looking at the various 'diff' formats, such as character
diff, word diff, and line diff for discussions.
Thanks
--Xiaozhu
Philip