Experiences mining open source release histories

Software releases form a critical part of the life cycle of a software project. Typically, each project produces releases in its own way, using various methods of versioning, archiving, announcing and publishing the release. Understanding the release history of a software project can shed light on the project history, as well as the release process used by that project, and how those processes change. However, many factors make automating the retrieval of release history information difficult, such as the many sources of data, a lack of relevant standards and a disparity of tools used to create releases. In spite of the large amount of raw data available, no attempt has been made to create a release history database of a large number of projects in the open source ecosystem. This paper presents our experiences, including the tools, techniques and pitfalls, in our early work to create a software release history database which will be of use to future researchers who want to study and model the release engineering process in greater depth.