# Software Heritage

Date: 2021-07-25 21:01:45 +08:00Date modified: 2021-07-28 00:02:38 +08:00

- project link is at https://www.softwareheritage.org/

- the infrastructure and tools they used is also open source; primarily happening at their software forge

- an ambitious project archiving all of humanity's publicly available source code

- primarily made for researchers to easily refer to software; a centralized database for referring software similar to digital object identifiers (DOI) in research materials and ISBN for books

- the archive itself is more of a gigantic merkle tree with the ability to interact with the individual objects such as commits, revisions, snapshots, and even the very source code files of an archived repo

- it is version control software-agnostic; archived software from several sources (e.g., Git, Mercurial)

- each object is given an identifer referred to as Software Heritage persistent identifiers (SWHIDs)

- funded from donations including big companies and several not-for-profit foundations

- a big component for Reproducible research for other projects such as Nix package manager and Guix package manager used as a fallback when upstream vanished; soon enough, it will develop tools to integrate them further such as archiving the code used to build the binary cache

- there is a public interface for browsing the archive

- they have dedicated resources into creating an infrastructure for creating a centralized reference for software such the following list

  - swh.fuse, a tool that integrates the archive into a user-local filesystem integrating the archive for development workflow

  - roam:swh.search adding the search functionality in the archive

  - roam:swh.lister lists from several forges (e.g., GitHub, GitLab)

## Backlinks

- Software archives
- The Software Heritage Filesystem (SwhFS): Integrating Source Code Archival with Development