Exploring the use of automated API migrating techniques in practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, open source software libraries have allowed developers to build robust applications by consuming freely available application program interfaces (API). However, when these APIs evolve, consumers are left with the difficult task of migration. Studies on API migration often assume that software documentation lacks explicit information for migration guidance and is impractical for API consumers. Past research has shown that it is possible to present migration suggestions based on historical code-change information. On the other hand, research approaches with optimistic views of documentation have also observed positive results. Yet, the assumptions made by prior approaches have not been evaluated on large scale practical systems, leading to a need to affirm their validity. This paper reports our recent practical experience migrating the use of Android APIs in FDroid apps when leveraging approaches based on documentation and historical code changes. Our experiences suggest that migration through historical codechanges presents various challenges and that API documentation is undervalued. In particular, the majority of migrations from removed or deprecated Android APIs to newly added APIs can be suggested by a simple keyword search in the documentation. More importantly, during our practice, we experienced that the challenges of API migration lie beyond migration suggestions, in aspects such as coping with parameter type changes in new API. Future research may aim to design automated approaches to address the challenges that are documented in this experience report.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".