Cloning and copying between GNOME projects

Abstract

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.