  Obtaining a relevant dataset is central to conducting empirical studies in
software engineering. However, in the context of mining software repositories,
the lack of appropriate tooling for large scale mining tasks hinders the
creation of new datasets. Moreover, limitations related to data sources that
change over time (e.g., code bases) and the lack of documentation of extraction
processes make it difficult to reproduce datasets over time. This threatens the
quality and reproducibility of empirical studies.
  In this paper, we propose a tool-supported approach facilitating the creation
of large tailored datasets while ensuring their reproducibility. We leveraged
all the sources feeding the Software Heritage append-only archive which are
accessible through a unified programming interface to outline a reproducible
and generic extraction process. We propose a way to define a unique fingerprint
to characterize a dataset which, when provided to the extraction process,
ensures that the same dataset will be extracted.
  We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by implementing a prototype.
We show how it can help reduce the limitations researchers face when creating
or reproducing datasets.
