@article{LiTSE2022,

title = {An Empirical Study of Yanked Releases in the Rust Package Registry},

author = {Hao Li and Filipe R. Cogo and Cor-Paul Bezemer},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-02-14},

urldate = {2022-02-14},

journal = {Transactions of Software Engineering (TSE)},

abstract = {Cargo, the software packaging manager of Rust, provides a yank mechanism to support release-level deprecation, which

can prevent packages from depending on yanked releases. Most prior studies focused on code-level (i.e., deprecated APIs) and

package-level deprecation (i.e., deprecated packages). However, few studies have focused on release-level deprecation. In this study,

we investigate how often and how the yank mechanism is used, the rationales behind its usage, and the adoption of yanked releases in

the Cargo ecosystem. Our study shows that 9.6% of the packages in Cargo have at least one yanked release, and the proportion of

yanked releases kept increasing from 2014 to 2020. Package owners yank releases for other reasons than withdrawing a defective

release, such as fixing a release that does not follow semantic versioning or indicating a package is removed or replaced. In addition,

we found that 46% of the packages directly adopted at least one yanked release and the yanked releases propagated through the

dependency network, which leads to 1.4% of the releases in the ecosystem having unresolved dependencies.},

keywords = {Release Management, Software Ecosystem},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{cogo2021,

title = {An Empirical Study of Same-day Releases of Popular Packages in the npm Ecosystem},

author = {Filipe R. Cogo and Gustavo A. Oliva and Cor-Paul Bezemer and Ahmed E. Hassan},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-04-05},

urldate = {2021-04-05},

journal = {Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE)},

abstract = {Within a software ecosystem, client packages can reuse provider

packages as third-party libraries. The reuse relation between client and provider packages is called a dependency. When a client package depends on the code of a provider package, every change that is introduced in a release of the provider has the potential to impact the client package. Since a large number of dependencies exist within a software ecosystem, releases of a popular provider package can impact a large number of clients. Occasionally, multiple releases of a popular package need to be published on the same day, leading to a scenario in which the time available to revise, test, build, and document the release is restricted compared to releases published within a regular schedule. In this paper, our objective is to study the same-day releases that are published by popular packages in the npm ecosystem. We design an exploratory study to characterize the type of changes that are introduced in same-day releases, the prevalence of same-day releases in the npm ecosystem, and the adoption of same-day releases by client packages. A preliminary manual analysis of the existing release notes suggests that same-day releases introduce non-trivial changes (e.g., bug fixes). We then focus on three RQs. First, we study how often same-day releases are published. We found that the median proportion of regularly scheduled releases that are interrupted by a same-day release (per popular package) is 22%, suggesting the importance of having timely and systematic procedures to cope with same-day releases. Second, we

study the performed code changes in same-day releases. We observe that 32% of the same-day releases have larger changes compared with their prior release, thus showing that some same-day releases can undergo significant maintenance activity despite their time-constrained nature. In our third RQ, we study how client packages react to same-day releases of their providers. We observe the vast majority of client packages that adopt the release preceding the same-day release would also adopt the latter without having to change their versioning statement (implicit updates). We also note that explicit adoptions of sameday releases (i.e., adoptions that require a change to the versioning statement of the provider in question) is significantly faster than the explicit adoption of regular releases. Based on our findings, we argue that (i) third-party tools that support the automation of dependency management (e.g., Dependabot) should consider explicitly flagging same-day releases, (ii) popular packages should strive for optimized release pipelines that can properly handle same-day releases, and (iii) future research should design scalable, ecosystem-ready tools that support provider packages in assessing the impact of their code changes on client packages.},

keywords = {Dependencies, Release Management, Same-day Release, Software Ecosystem},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}