git-forks-analysis

Analyze forks network to find interesting forks, commits, file changes.

Why build it?

• Frustration with navigation forks graph / network on GitHub
• Too many forks with nothing interesting and noisy commits
• Wanting to find changes made to a file, function or a set of lines across the network to avoid duplicating the work (fixing similar bugs or building similar features)

How does it work?

• Gets all forks and all branches into a single repository
• Make available git data mining tools such as gitinspector and git_stats. Use the tools in this repository as they have been modified to work across all branches
• View other Tips below on how to search across the forks network using Git commands

How to install it?

git clone https://github.com/hbt/git-forks-analysis
cd git-forks-analysis
docker-compose pull 

How to use it?

To generate HTML visualization of forks

cd bin

./analyze-forks username repository

# retrieve all direct forks for https://github.com/hbt/mouseless
./analyze-forks hbt mouseless

# retrieve all forks recursively (the whole network) https://github.com/frost-nzcr4/find_forks -- purposefully chose a small repo to avoid running this by mistake
./analyze-forks-deep frost-nzcr4 find_forks

Calling the gitinspector directly via CLI

./bin/gitinspector /out/mouseless
./bin/gitinspector --grading=true /out/mouseless
./bin/gitinspector --grading=true  --format=html /out/mouseless

What does it look like?

• gitinspector of mouseless mouseless HTML
• gitinspector CLI output mouseless CLI
• quick_stats of mouseless mouseless quick stats

How to find interesting forks?

• Forks with stars / watchers -- use https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html
• Looks for commits count, insertions and deletion counts

How to search for commits per file across all forks and branches?

cd out/mouseless
git log --all background_scripts/extension-reloader.js

# include diffs
git log -p --all background_scripts/extension-reloader.js

How to search for changes in a function across all forks and branches?

# look for contributions to a specific function across all forks
git log --all -p -L ":getCenters":lib/model/PersonInfo.php --ignore-all-space --ignore-space-change --ignore-space-at-eol --ignore-blank-lines


# also accepts line numbers range
git log --all -p -L 13,20:lib/model/PersonInfo.php --ignore-all-space --ignore-space-change --ignore-space-at-eol --ignore-blank-lines

#modify ~/.gitattributes to add language support
#*.php diff=php
#*.js diff=node

#normalize the repo in case of ^M
#Note: this might corrupt some file formats (e.g binary, images etc.)
#https://superuser.com/questions/293941/rewrite-git-history-to-replace-all-crlf-to-lf

#**Note: perform all operations on tmpfs. Much faster**
#normalize the whole repo and its history
# specific file  (much faster) -- few minutes
git filter-branch --tree-filter 'git ls-files lib/model/PersonInfo.php -z | xargs -0 fromdos' -- --all

#whole repo but takes longer
git filter-branch --tree-filter 'git ls-files -z | xargs -0 fromdos' -- --all


#Alternative if language is not properly supported is to use pickaxe
git log --all -p -S"function createHints"  content_scripts/hints.js

# for some languages, --function-context works well
git log --all -p -ScreateHints --function-context content_scripts/hints.js

How to search commits that have not been merged?

git log -p --all --not master --no-merges

How to find most modified files in forks?

git log --all --pretty=format: --name-only --not master --no-merges | sort | uniq -c | sort -rg | head -10

Other git data mining tools worth a mention

• https://github.com/askgitdev/askgit -- Query git repositories with SQL.
• https://github.com/src-d/gitbase -- Turns Git Repository into an SQL database
• https://github.com/src-d/hercules
• https://github.com/arzzen/git-quick-stats -- interactive tool
• https://github.com/src-d/vecino -- Recommends similar repositories
• https://github.com/src-d/msc -- Recommends topics per repo based on content
• https://github.com/jgehring/pepper -- not tried
• https://github.com/brendangregg/FlameGraph -- not tried but lots of stars
• https://github.com/tj/git-extras -- git-effort amongst others
• https://github.com/ejwa/gitinspector -- used in this repo to create CLI git stats
• https://github.com/tomgi/git_stats --used in this repo to create HTML git stats
• https://pydriller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/intro.html -- python api to parse git commits
• https://github.com/arzzen/git-quick-stats/ -- CLI tool to browse contributors stats

Contribute: Get in touch if you have a git data mining tool recommendation