Software Heritage

• 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)