WG211/M16Lawall

Prequel: A Patch-Like Query Language for Commit History Search, by Julia Lawall

The commit history of a code base such as the Linux kernel is a gold mine of information on how evolutions should be made, how bugs should be fixed, etc. Nevertheless, the high volume of commits available and the rudimentary filtering tools provided mean that it is often necessary to wade through a lot of irrelevant information before finding example commits that can help with a specific software development problem. To address this issue, we propose Prequel (Patch Query Language), which brings the descriptive power of code matching to the problem of querying a commit history. We evaluate Prequel in the context of the problem of porting Linux drivers across versions, which illustrates a variety of development problems for which the code history can provide example solutions.

Joint work with Derek Palinski and Gilles Muller