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

<center> <small>Sponsored by:</small> https://www.honeybadger.io/images/navbar_logo.svg?1597697989 (https://www.honeybadger.io/) </center> 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 s