Architecture

The goals of this artifact template are to produce an artifact which can:

1. Be used to both produce (by yourself) and reproduce (by others) experimental results for/from the associated paper;
2. Be used by others just like any piece of software (if applicable), in various contexts (such as research—e.g., other papers, or industry).

As such, this template proposes to split the work into two repositories:

• The tool repository, containing the software itself, to be independently maintained and distributed as needed;
• The artifact repository, building on the tool repository, but also adding any additional material needed to (re)produce experimental results for/from the associated paper.

This split allows for nominal maintenance of both parts of the work. On the one hand, the tool repository should be both published in a live repository (e.g., on GitHub), to allow authors to continue to maintain and distribute the tool, allow others to fork and contribute to it, and archived, to allow for long-term preservation and enable reproduction in the future. On the other hand, the artifact repository should also be archived (for the same reasons), but it should probably not be published in a live repository, as it is not destined to be distributed or accept contributions from others; after all, its only purpose is reproducing the results of the associated paper.

This way, the two repositories can stay clean, containing only relevant content, and avoiding confusion regarding the two main "target groups": developers or researchers modifying the tool are probably only interested in the tool repository, while artifact evaluators are probably only interested in the artifact repository.