swh.provenance 0.1.1

Software Heritage provenance

Software Heritage - Provenance

This service provide a provenance query service for the Software Heritage Archive. Provenance is the ability to ask for a given object stored in the Archive: “where does it come from?”

This question generally does not have a simple and unambiguous answer. It can be, among other:

• what it the oldest revision in which this object has been found?

• what is the “better” origin in which this object can be found?

Answering this kind of question requires querying the Merkle DAG on which the Software Heritage Archive is built with complex queries, mostly from the bottom to the top (aka from Content to Origin objects).

The idea is to use both the compressed graph representation of the Archive (swh-graph) and a preprocessed provenance index to speed up some of the provenance queries.

API Description

For a single object:

Input: SWHID (core SWHID of an artifact found in the use code base)

Output: SWHID or origin URI where input SWHID was found + context information
    Context information, a subset of:
        snapshot (snp SWHID)
        release (rel)
        revision (rev)
        path (filesystem-style path)

Non-functional requirements: TODO something about the fact that both the
answer and the context information should be "as high as possible" in the
graph

Public API

GET /whereis/:swhid

GET /whereis_all/

POST /whereare/TODO
  :swhids