An Analysis of Gradual Patch Application: A Better Explanation of Patch Acceptance

Patch submission has been known as one of the most important activities to sustain the open source software (OSS). The patch archive can be analyzed to procure many benefit cognizance for supporting the OSS project works. The recent models and methods that analyze the patches acceptance are quite rack of comprehensive; hence, complex activities such as a committer portioning the Passed QA patch out and accept are still excluded from the analysis. Therefore, the results derived from those methods would be inadequate to conclude the actual patch acceptance. In this research, we introduce an algorithm for analyzing patch acceptance including the partial and gradually accepted conditions. Validating our algorithm, we present our methods for indicating the partial and gradual application of the Passed QA patch between either mailing list and SVN or Bugzilla and CVS which are the commonly deployed patch-activities related system. We studied on two well known OSS projects; Apache HTTP and Eclipse Platform. We obtained a fascinating conclusion that larger patches have more confident to be accepted than the smaller contradicted to other analysis that came from the recent methods.