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

• primarily features swh-fuse, a utility allowing to mount software from Software Heritage to your local environment quickly

• it is based from POSIX filesystems built with FUSE framework; as such it does not require root privileges to use it

• it exposes the global merkle tree as a filesystem along with its metadata, archive, etc.

• it can interact with the objects in the merkle tree such as the source code files, commits, snapshots, etc.

• the tool is essentially a FUSE adapter to Software Heritage API

• future considerations include for mining software repositories and integrations with Git making commands work inside of the filesystem

features:

• the tool lazily loads the archives to save bandwidth and disk space

• caches for performance especially with how bad remote filesystems can be

• reduces redundancy by using symlinks extensively