To investigate the improper version releases of developers, we filter the time interval between version releases of each library.
In total, 9,804,419 times of version updates have been identified, we find that
133 libraries (0.01%) have time intervals that are shorter than 1 second,
55,041 libraries (4.8%) have time intervals that are shorter than 1 minute,
560,553 libraries (48.85%) have time intervals that are shorter than 1 hour.
Besides, we also count the number of short time intervals and find that:
1,127 time intervals (0.01%) are shorter than 1 second,
152,692 time intervals (1.56%) are shorter than 1 minute,
3,000,093 time intervals (30.6%) are shorter than 1 hour.
To investigate the initiative change on direct dependencies from developers, we filter out libraries that have changed their direct dependencies during version upgrades. We find that 70.82% libraries (812,662) have more than one version, among them, only 33.61% %of them (385,681) have ever introduced direct dependency changes. In total, 9,804,419 times of version updates (releasing new version) have been identified, and 29.17% of them (2,859,805) come with direct dependency changes.
On average, every 3.42 version releases bring one direct dependency update. 83.71% version releases (8,207,188 out of 9,804,419) are patch version releases (including pre-release tag changes), and the rest 16.29% are major or minor version releases {(2.96% and 13.33%, 290,289 and 1,306,942 out of 9,804,419. respectively). However, 44.68% major version upgrades have modified direct dependencies, while only 33.80% and 27.88% of minor and patch version releases have introduced direct dependency changes.