Episode 53: What the Fork? Shurui Zou on Forking in Open Source

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Panelists Justin Dorfman | Richard Littauer Guest Shurui Zhou
Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! On today’s episode, we
have special guest, Shurui Zhou, who is going to be teaching soon
at University of Toronto in the Fall, and she’s been working on
Forks on GitHub. Our topic today is Social vs. Hard Forks. We will
learn all about the difference between the Social and Hard forks,
Shurui’s GitHub Bot she wrote, and her paper she wrote on
“Identifying Features in Forks.” Also, Jenkins, previously known as
Hudson, an open source continuous integration tool, is explained
and why it is such a success story in terms of hard forks. Download
this episode now! [00:01:31] Shurui tells us about her PhD Thesis
which is on Forks. [00:02:51] Richard wonders what Shurui means
when she said she tried to merge together different forks. She also
tells us where she got her initial forks from that she was trying
to merge and where the initial database was seeded from. [00:05:57]
Richard wants to know without the domain knowledge of a maintainer
does Shurui find it difficult to figure out what is going on. Also,
has she seen any frustrations from maintainers? She wrote a GitHub
Bot that she talks about. [00:10:42] Shurui tells us about a future
work that was super interesting which is how we can identify the
intention behind this work. She mentions the paper they published
on 2018 on “Identifying Features in Forks” and talks about the
difference in hard fork and social fork. [00:13:11] One thing that
caught Justin’s attention is that 290 projects on GitHub are
rejected to “redundant development” and Shurui explains what this
means. [00:17:00] Richard wonders if Shurui has run across this
phenomenon of someone being the only maintainer and being a selfish
person wanting all the stars and is this a common thing. [00:19:04]
Richard wants to know how Shurui is dealing with the political side
of things. [00:20:04] Shurui talks about the project she was
referring to which is a repository. Richard wonders how many hard
forks she’s found where it’s just some company that wants to do
something, versus a group of community members who are interested
in building out a feature and having it go in a different
direction. Also, how many times do you see a company decide we need
to have this under our own wheelhouse and fork it and them develop
independently without going back? She brings up the Hudson and
Jenkins story. [00:26:22] Richard asks Shurui if she’s tried making
forks. [00:29:00] Shurui tells us where we can find her on the
internet and how can we learn more about her research. Spotlight
[00:30:14] Justin’s spotlight is he’s rescuing a Golden Doodle
puppy and go to YouTube for dog training videos. [00:30:45]
Richard’s spotlight is the Library of Babel. [00:31:26] Shurui’s
spotlights are two repositories on GitHub, Marlin and Smoothieware,
and she wants to thank her collaborators and her PhD advisor.
Quotes [00:08:16] “The maintainer will go through the code and with
the description all together in the mail and to decide whether we
want to merge it or not.” [00:10:55] “One of the future works I
think that was super interesting is how we can identify the
intention behind this work.” [00:11:19] “And we actually define
these kinds of forks as social forks because people create forks
and maybe their goal is to merge back.” [00:11:30] “We found out
there are two types of forks and we define forks that create a fork
and going to a different direction and never come back we defined
this as a hard fork, and we define the GitHub style fork as a
social fork.” [00:12:26] “We have seen some requests happening in
one community and have been submitted three years later, exactly
the same feature.” [00:12:46] “I know the title to this podcast. It
is going to be social vs hard fork with Shurui.” [00:17:00] “But,
if I were to hard fork it, I would lose all the watchers, all the
stars, and I was signaled to every single one of those people that
I’m kind of a selfish guy who wants stars.” [00:17:55] “They don’t
want people to hard fork and to fragment the community and go to a
different direction.” [00:19:22] “I’m not dealing with the
political side, but what I’m trying to do is to just raise
awareness of what’s happening with different forks.” [00:21:19]
“Jenkins was a hard fork off of Hudson because that’s the people
after Oracle… and they want to maintain or keep the Hudson project
within their pocket.” [00:24:09] “One thing we’ve studied to
compare the difference between the hard fork and social fork before
and after GitHub, is maybe before GitHub people create a fork, they
have already the intention of going to a different direction to
fragment the community.” Links Shurui Zhou Twitter
(https://twitter.com/shuishuiblue?lang=en)** ** Shurui Zhou-
University of Toronto, Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering (https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~shuruiz/) “Identifying
Features in Forks”-Shurui Zhou
(https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~shuruiz/paper/INFOX_ICSE2018.pdf)
“Identifying Redundancies in Fork-based Development”-Shurui Zhou
(https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~shuruiz/paper/saner19-RedundantDev.pdf)
Dog Training 101: How to Train ANY DOG the Basics-YouTube
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFMA5ggFsXU) Library of Babel
(https://libraryofbabel.info/) Marlin-GitHub
(https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin) Smoothieware-GitHub
(https://github.com/Smoothieware/Smoothieware) Credits Produced by
Richard Litauer (https://www.burntfent.com/) Edited by Paul M. Bahr
at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Show notes by
DeAnn Bahr at Peachtree Sound (https://www.peachtreesound.com/) Ad
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