Some free, open‐source software projects have been around for quite a long time, the longest living ones dating from the early 1980s. For some of them, detailed information about their evolution is available in source code management systems tracking all their code changes for periods of more than 15 years. This paper examines in detail the evolution of one of such projects, glibc, with the main aim of understanding how it evolved and how it matched Lehman's laws of software evolution. As a result, we have developed a methodology for studying the evolution of such long‐lived projects based on the information in their source code management repository, described in detail several aspects of the history of glibc, including some activity and size metrics, and found how some of the laws of software evolution may not hold in this case. © 2013 The Authors. Journal of Software: Evolution and Process published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

中文翻译：

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在一个长期存在的 FLOSS 项目中研究软件进化的规律

一些免费的开源软件项目已经存在了很长时间，最长寿的项目可以追溯到 1980 年代初。对于其中一些，源代码管理系统中提供了有关其演变的详细信息，跟踪其所有代码更改超过 15 年。本文详细研究了其中一个项目 glibc 的演变，主要目的是了解它是如何演变的以及它如何与雷曼的软件演变定律相匹配。因此，我们开发了一种方法，用于根据源代码管理存储库中的信息研究此类长期项目的演变，详细描述了 glibc 历史的几个方面，包括一些活动和大小指标，并发现在这种情况下，某些软件进化定律可能不成立。© 2013 作者。Journal of Software: Evolution and Process 由 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 出版。