Data Sets: The Circle of Life in Ruby Hosting, 2003-2015

Abstract

Studying software repositories and hosting services can provide valuable insights into the behaviors of large groups of software developers and their projects. Traditionally, most analysis of metadata collected from hosting services has been conducted by specifying some short window of time, typically just a few years. To date, few - if any - studies have been built from data comprising the entirety of a repository's lifespan: from its birth to its death, and rebirth. Thus, the first contribution of this data set is to support the historical analysis of over ten years of collected metadata from the now-defunct RubyForge project hosting site, as well as the follow-on successor to RubyForge, the RubyGems hosting facility. The data sets and sample analyses in this paper will be relevant to researchers studying both software evolution and the distributed software development process.