Cloning and copying between GNOME projects

—This paper presents an approach to automatically distinguish the copied clone from the original in a pair of clones. It matches the line-by-line version information of a clone to the pair’s other clone. A case study on the GNOME Desktop Suite revealed a complex flow of reused code between the different subprojects. In particular, it showed that the majority of larger clones (with a minimal size of 28 lines or higher) exist between the subprojects and more than 60% of the clone pairs can be automatically separated into original and copy.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: MSR
• Authors: Jens Krinke, Nicolas Gold, Yue Jia, David Binkley
• Keywords: Clone Pairs, GNOME Desktop Suite, Line-by-line Version Information, MSR 2010