:PROPERTIES:
:ID:       9c85ffb2-fc90-4b38-abce-f0425a2b79de
:END:
#+title: Software Heritage
#+date: 2021-07-25 21:01:45 +08:00
#+date_modified: 2021-07-27 23:11:52 +08:00
#+language: en


- project link is at https://www.softwareheritage.org/
- the infrastructure and tools they used is also open source;
  primarily happening at [[https://forge.softwareheritage.org/][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, in other words
- it is stored in a global merkle tree which each project is given an identifer referred to as Software Heritage persistent identifiers (SWHIDs)
- the archive itself is more of a gigantic merkle tree with the ability to interact with the individualities such as commits, revisions, snapshots, and even the very source code files of an archived repo
- funded from donations including big companies and several not-for-profit foundations
- a big component for [[id:6eeb7a24-b662-46d6-9ece-00a5028ff4d8][Reproducible research]] for other projects such as [[id:3b3fdcbf-eb40-4c89-81f3-9d937a0be53c][Nix package manager]] and [[id:be917383-84c4-4bf5-9ca0-b04bfb778f4f][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 [[https://archive.softwareheritage.org/][public interface for browsing the archive]]
- they have dedicated resources into creating an infrastructure for creating a centralized reference for software such as a user-local filesystem integrating the archive for development workflow (see [[id:4703f8c2-225c-4c76-a788-af04b84309ac][The Software Heritage Filesystem (SwhFS): Integrating Source Code Archival with Development]])