Finding out how close source code files are to files in the Git version control system.

Abstract

A lot of popular software is developed using a version control system. Historically systems such as RCS, CVS and Subversion were used, but a lot of developers have moved to Git. These systems have a lot of information available about the history of a file. When software is distributed, it is often distributed without this history information. In some situations it is important to find out how close a certain piece of software is to any given version in a version control system, for example for assessing copyright, security research or other provenance issues. keywords: Git, software engineering, security, defect discovery, tls