In this work, we investigate the practice of patch construction in the Linux kernel development, focusing on the di erences between three patching processes: (1) patches crafted entirely manually to x bugs, (2) those that are derived from warnings of bug detection tools, and (3) those that are automatically generated based on x patterns. With this study, we provide to the research community concrete insights on the practice of patching as well as how the development community is currently embracing research and commercial patching tools to improve productivity in repair. The result of our study shows that tool-supported patches are increasingly adopted by the developer community while manually-written patches are accepted more quickly. Patch application tools enable developers to remain committed to contributing patches to the code base. Our ndings also include that, in actual development processes, patches generally implement several change operations spread over the code, even for patches xing warnings by bug detection tools. Finally, this study has shown that there is an opportunity to directly leverage the output of bug detection tools to readily generate patches that are appropriate for xing the problem, and that are consistent with manually-written patches. •Software and its engineering →Software maintenance tools; Software con guration management and version control systems; Software version control;
Koyuncu et al. REF investigated the practice of patch construction to study the impact of different patch generation techniques in Linux kernel development.
Impact of Tool Support in Patch Construction
\acmConference{ISSTA '17}{July 10-14, 2017}{Santa Barbara, CA, USA}\acmPrice{15.00}\acmDOI{10.1145/3092703.3092713} \acmISBN{978-1-4503-5076-1/17/07}
Computer Science