  The availability of open-source projects facilitates developers to contribute
and collaborate on a wide range of projects. As a result, the developer
community contributing to such open-source projects is also increasing. Many of
the projects involve frequent updates and extensive reuses. A well-updated
documentation helps in a better understanding of the software project and also
facilitates efficient contribution and reuse. Though software documentation
plays an important role in the development and maintenance of software, it also
suffers from various issues that include insufficiency, inconsistency,
ill-maintainability, and so on. Exploring the perception of developers towards
documentation could help in understanding the reasons behind prevalent issues
in software documentation. It could further aid in deciding on training that
could be given to the developer community towards building more sustainable
projects for society. Analyzing sentiments of contributors to a project could
provide insights on understanding developer perceptions. Hence, as the first
step towards this direction, we analyze sentiments of commit messages specific
to the documentation of a software project. To this end, we considered the
commit history of 998 GitHub projects from the GHTorrent dataset and identified
10,996 commits that correspond to the documentation of repositories. Further,
we apply sentiment analysis techniques to obtain insights on the type of
sentiment being expressed in commit messages of the selected commits. We
observe that around 45% of the identified commit messages express trust
emotion.
