I know, the question of how to cite source code has been asked before, but I did not found anything helpful for my specific situation.
I am currently writing my master's thesis. My university does not dictate any particular citation style so I just use biblatex's default settings. My work is quite OS-specific, so I have to cite Linux source code on several places throughout.
I found the Linux cross reference, which allows me to reference specific code lines for specific Linux versions. I intent to use this for my purpose, so I will cite URLs in the form of http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/<filepath>?v=<version>#L<linenumber>
. However, I do not know how to exactly do this.
I know biblatex provides the online
type which should be generally applicable, since I am citing URLs. I have two problems with this, though:
- What do I fill in as the author/editor? Linux is written by hundreds of people and surely there would be no benefit in mentioning them all. Should I drop the editor/author and instead fill in the organization? But then, do I refer to the
Free Software Foundation holding the copyright to LinuxLinux Foundation or rather to the maintainers of the Linux cross reference? - I feel like a larger amount of such source code references would clutter the bibliography. Hence, I would rather have an extra section (like a secondary bibliography) listing only those source code references. Is there a solution for this use case? Or should I save the effort and accept the cluttering?
y
you can turn the link into a permalink containing the commit SHA. – Federico Poloni Jun 30 '15 at 12:15