2014-12-02

Apple isn’t really famous for its contributions to open source projects: its latest major effort was Mac OS forge. As the name implies, it dates from when sourceforge was cool.

On the other hand, Apple publishes the code ot the opensource components it uses at opensource.apple.com. I wrote a small script that scrapes the projects metadata, downloads all the tarballs and recreates git repositories at github.com/unofficial-opensource-apple.

Apple releases opensource code for four Products: Developer Tools, OS X, OS X Server and iOS. For every Release of these products, they (in theory) also publish the sourcecode of the Version of the opensource Project.

There are 509 projects in total. Some are never actually referenced in a Product. (Like DarwinInstaller, of course, or zfs, unfortunately.) The source code is made available as tarballs for each version, 5334 in total.

tatin.py attempts to recreate a more usable git repository for each of these projects:

  • It downloads all the version tarballs of this project,
    • Creates a new commit for each version
    • Adds tags for each Product Release referencing this version.
    • The Modified-At header returned by opensource.apple.com when requesting the tarballs is relatively coherent after 2010. (The epoch of opensource.apple.com seems to be the 5th of February 2009.) This date is used as the GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE.
    • Additionally, the git user is set to opensource.apple.com. 1
  • Creates a repository at github.com/unofficial-opensource-apple/<project>

Warning: it’s written in Python, a language in which I am a total noob. Basically, it worked once on my machine. On the other hand, there’s probably something useful to be made of it. Pull requests are welcome.

GitX does a decent job to quicky look at the history of a repo. If you’d rather use the CLI, this pretty format is the best I’ve found so far:

objc4 $ git log --pretty=format:"%C(bold)%s %C(dim)%ci%Creset%d"
646 2014-10-30 20:55:50 +0000 (HEAD, tag: OS_X-10.10, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master)
551.1 2013-10-29 00:21:36 +0000 (tag: OS_X-10.9.5, tag: OS_X-10.9.4, tag: OS_X-10.9.3, tag: OS_X-10.9.2, tag: OS_X-10.9.1, tag: OS_X-10.9)
532.2 2012-09-28 15:34:15 +0000 (tag: OS_X-10.8.5, tag: OS_X-10.8.4, tag: OS_X-10.8.3, tag: OS_X-10.8.2)
[...]

Enjoy, and don’t hesitate to send comments and suggestions via twitter.com/_nb or submit an issue on github.

  1. A nice side effect of overriding the git commiter/author and the commit/author dates is that the commit hashes stay identical when a repository is recreated from scratch. ↩