Introduction to Software Heritage, the Alexandria library for code
summary
A global, long‑term archive stores source code and its history on a bespoke, tiered infrastructure with racks and mirrors (France, Italy) and serves researchers and companies (Intel, Microsoft, Huawei). It assigns an intrinsic identifier, Software Heritage ID, now heading for ISO standard, and exposes a browser extension to detect archived or out‑of‑date repos. The archive grows from about 3,000 million source files in 2016 to roughly five‑to‑six times that size, builds a full graph of software development history, and is already used for reproducible datasets.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Software Heritage mission
- 3:48Why preserving open source matters
- 10:15Organization and global effort
- 12:03Archive catalog and identifiers
- 23:54Archive scale today
- 26:05Graph of development history
- 27:06Archive your software
- 30:19Research using the archive
- 35:00Developer and company uses
- 36:48Contribute and collaborate
- 39:20Ensuring future access
- 40:08Q&A
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