Software Heritage,
the persistent source-code archive:
What is it and how to use it?
13 November 2023
Atelier Data Univ Eiffel - Les plateformes pour développer, partager et archiver les logiciels.
Joenio Marques da Costa
Research Software Engineer at LISIS lab
⚬ CorTexT platform
⚬ Research Infrastructure for STI (RISIS)
Software Heritage Ambassador - November 22, 2022
Introducing our newest ambassador, Joenio Marques da Costa
Universal software source code archive softwareheritage.org
🛈
More than 150M projects, almost 10 billion unique source files as of January 2021
Software Heritage archive
17 billion unique source files as of November 2023
why?
- 2015, Google Code and Gitorious.org shutdown
- 2019, BitBucket announces Mercurial VCS sunset
- 2020, BitBucket erases 250.000+ repositories
- 2021, Inria’s old gforge.inria.fr was shutdown
- 2022,
GitLab.com considers erasing all projects that are inactive for a year
GitLab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
Software Heritage
=
GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, Google Code … ?
Why not?
Zenodo, HAL, figshare… ?
Source: Image from imgflip meme generator
Cause
Software is not Data
Source: Image from imgflip meme generator
Features
Software Heritage archive
The long term source code archive.
Software Heritage Hash identifier (SWHID)
Intrinsic identifiers for digital objects.
One type of identifier can’t answer all use cases, we need both intrinsic identifiers and extrinsic identifiers for software research outputs.
softwareheritage.org/2020/07/09/intrinsic-vs-extrinsic-identifiers
What can be identified with a SWHID?
softwareheritage.org/faq/#32_What_can_be_identified_with_a_SWHID
SWHID howtos:
- HOWTO archive and reference your code
- Archiving and Referencing Source Code with Software Heritage
- https://ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-software
Examples of SWHID use:
Source code: github.com/joenio/swhid-citation-example
SWHID Approved Specification
Source: team mailing list
The SWHID Specification Version 1.1.
The next step is the submission to ISO in order to become a standard.
Extra references:
Thanks!
joenio@joenio.me
This presentation is available at:
http://joenio.me/software-heritage-uge-data
(source-code: https://gitlab.com/joenio/joenio.gitlab.io)
Presentation history
Where and when this presentation was done
- 13 November 2023, Online, Data Univ Eiffel - RDV DATA sur les plateformes dediees aus logiciels