The Software Heritage Filesystem (SwhFS): Integrating Source Code Archival with Development

Thibault Allançon (1) , Antoine Pietri (2) , Stefano Zacchiroli (3, 2)

1 LRDE - Laboratoire de Recherche et de Développement de l'EPITA
2 DGD-I - Direction générale déléguée à l'innovation
3 UPCité - Université Paris Cité

We introduce the Software Heritage filesystem (SwhFS), a user-space filesystem that integrates large-scale open source software archival with development workflows. SwhFS provides a POSIX filesystem view of Software Heritage, the largest public archive of software source code and version control system (VCS) development history. Using SwhFS, developers can quickly "checkout" any of the 2 billion commits archived by Software Heritage, even after they disappear from their previous known location and without incurring the performance cost of repository cloning. SwhFS works across unrelated repositories and different VCS technologies. Other source code artifacts archived by Software Heritage-individual source code files and trees, releases, and branches-can also be accessed using common programming tools and custom scripts, as if they were locally available. A screencast of SwhFS is available online at dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4531411.

Mots clés: source code; FUSE; filesystem; open source; version control system; digital libraries; digital preservation

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Thibault Allançon, Antoine Pietri, Stefano Zacchiroli. The Software Heritage Filesystem (SwhFS): Integrating Source Code Archival with Development. ICSE 2021: the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering, May 2021, Madrid, Spain. ⟨hal-03139393⟩