The maintainability of open-source supply chain software is crucial for ensuring the security and efficiency of software systems. This research will focus on this area by identifying, quantifying, and validating specific maintainability indicators. Through a structured literature review, empirical surveys, and comparative analyses of projects like webpack and babel, the study develops a comprehensive set of metrics, including team health, project activity, and others. These metrics are quantified and validated, as demonstrated in a case study on AngularJs. The outcomes provide a novel framework for evaluating maintainability in open-source software, offering essential insights for sustainable development and maintenance within the complex environment of software supply chains.

We present HyperCRX, a browser extension designed to enhance the open source experience by providing insights into GitHub projects and developers. Our tool seamlessly integrates with GitHub, offering interactive features that reveal the maintenance status of projects, the activity level of developers, and the connections between projects or developers. To ensure optimal performance, we have developed a special feature loading mechanism that supports the smooth operation of the existing 14 features. HyperCRX is now available on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, boasting a significant user base of 1,000 users on each browser. Our extension caters to a diverse range of users, including software engineers, project maintainers, open source newcomers, and company employers. With HyperCRX, users can make informed decisions and gain valuable insights to facilitate their engagement in the open source community. The source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/hypertrons/hypertrons-crx, and a video screencast demonstrating the features can be found at https://youtu.be/_zm3FfpnZ28.

Open source software (OSS) on GitHub is experiencing continued growth and a rapid rise in the creation of projects. As OSS evolved, numerous projects faced decline, with some inevitably degrading into unmaintained status and getting archived by the owners. Understanding the deprecated projects helps deepen the perception of OSS maintenance and evolution. This paper describes the study of 361 popular GitHub projects that have been archived. By reading repository READMEs and sending surveys to project maintainers, we found the software repositories were archived due to being transferred, evolved, or unmaintained. We provide a set of 16 reasons and 10 practices to describe why and how these projects were archived. We further reveal the OSS development activity lifecycle patterns by fitting their commit history curves. We also confirmed the importance of the bus factor risk that would influence the sustainability of open source projects. Archiving a software repository is an explicit indication of repository deprecation. By providing the reason (the why), the strategy (the how), and the lifecycle patterns (the what) of the archived projects, we bring implications and practices that promote the health and sustainability of open source projects and the ecosystem overall.

The rise of container technology has brought about profound changes in the data center, and many software have been transferred to micro-service deployment and delivery. Therefore, it is of a broad practical significance to optimize the startup, operation and maintenance of large-scale containers in a massive user environment. At present, the mainstream container technology represented by Docker has achieved great success, but there is still much room for improvement in image volume and resource sharing. We reviewed the development of virtualization technology, and clarify that lightweight virtualization technology is the future research direction, which is very important for data-sensitive applications. By establishing a library file sharing model, we explored the impact of the degree of sharing of library files on the maximum number of containers that can be launched. We present an ultra-lightweight container design that minimizes the container runtime environment that supports application execution by refining the granularity of operational resources. At the same time, we extract the library files and the executable binary files into a single layer, which realizes the maximum sharing of the host's memory resources among containers. Then, according to the above scheme, we implement an ultra-lightweight container management engine: Reg (runtime environment generation), and a Reg-based workflow is defined. Finally, we carried out a series of comparative experiments on mirror volume, startup speed, memory usage and container startup storm, verified the effectiveness of proposed method in the large-scale container environment.