  Online collaboration platforms such as GitHub have provided software
developers with the ability to easily reuse and share code between
repositories. With clone-and-own and forking becoming prevalent, maintaining
these shared files is important, especially for keeping the most up-to-date
version of reused code. Different to related work, we propose the concept of
meta-maintenance -- i.e., tracking how the same files evolve in different
repositories with the aim to provide useful maintenance opportunities to those
files. We conduct an exploratory study by analyzing repositories from seven
different programming languages to explore the potential of meta-maintenance.
Our results indicate that a majority of active repositories on GitHub contains
at least one file which is also present in another repository, and that a
significant minority of these files are maintained differently in the different
repositories which contain them. We manually analyzed a representative sample
of shared files and their variants to understand which changes might be useful
for meta-maintenance. Our findings support the potential of meta-maintenance
and open up avenues for future work to capitalize on this potential.
