This dataset has been created as part of the EMPRI-DEVOPS research project to investigate how users of Git configure the presentation of date information (author and committer date) in Git's command line output, as well as what date-related output filters they use.
The dataset was built from about 20,000 publicly available .gitconfig files
and contains all date-related configuration options that are available in Git.
We originally built the dataset for the paper "Data Minimisation Potential for
Timestamps in Git: An Empirical Analysis of User Configurations" to investigate
the potential for timestamp-focused data minimisation.
We recommend our read the paper to understand the methodology of extracting
this dataset from .gitconfig files published on GitHub.
The dataset is provided in the JSON format and comprises a list of objects each
representing the analytics for one .gitconfig file.
Each analytics lists alias evaluations for:
- commands like log that allow date and pretty formatting (
alias_dp), - commands like blame that only allow date formatting (
alias_do), and - commands like _log that only allow since/until filtering (
alias_su).
This is followed by an analysis of pretty.* settings, i.e., pretty formatting
aliases in JSON field pretty_aliases_stats.
Finally, The settings for log.date and blame.date are provided.
Here, any free-form date formatting string is replaced by the word custom.
We recommend to first look at the examples provided in example-configs/ to
get familiar with the format.
If you use this dataset in your research, please cite the accompanying paper: (Currently the paper is accepted but not yet published)
Burkert, Christian and Ansohn McDougall, Johanna and Federrath, Hannes: "Data Minimisation Potential for Timestamps in Git: An Empirical Analysis of User Configurations". To be presented at IFIP SEC 2022.