Regurgitate: Using GIT For F/LOSS Data Collection

We have created a new tool, regurgitate, for importing CVS repositories into the GIT source code management system. Important features of GIT include great expressiveness in capturing relationships between revisions and across files as well as extremely high-speed processing. These features make GIT an ideal platform for gathering detailed longitudinal metrics for open source projects. The availability of regurgitate facilitates using GIT as an analysis tool for that majority of open source projects that keep their repositories in CVS. In particular, GIT is fast enough that it is practical to replay the entire development history of a project commit-at-a-time, collecting metrics at each step. We demonstrate this process for a simple metric and a collection of benchmark F/LOSS repositories.