Rationale Dataset and Analysis for the Commit Messages of the Linux Kernel Out-of-Memory Killer

TL;DR

The creation of a labelled dataset to analyze the code commit messages of the Linux Kernel Out-Of-Memory Killer component is detailed and aspects of rationale information, such as presence, temporal evolution, and structure are studied.

Abstract

Code commit messages can contain useful information on why a developer has made a change. However, the presence and structure of rationale in real-world code commit messages is not well studied. Here, we detail the creation of a labelled dataset to analyze the code commit messages of the Linux Kernel Out-Of-Memory Killer component. We study aspects of rationale information, such as presence, temporal evolution, and structure. We find that 98.9% of commits in our dataset contain sentences with rationale information, and that experienced developers report rationale in about 60% of the sentences in their commits. We report on the challenges we faced and provide examples for our labelling.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Distribution of the sentences in our OOM dataset
• Figure 2: Most frequent words per category, without overlap
• Figure 3: Commit message size versus rationale density
• Figure 4: Commits per author vs average rationale density
• Figure 5: Monthly evolution of the average rationale density