Strong dependencies and strong dominators
Historical dominance graph: KDE cluster in Debian Sarge |
FOSS distributions are composed of dozens of thousands packages, and
hundreds of thousands of dependencies. Visualizing such huge graphs in a
way that allows to identify some interesting features is a real
challenge.
In Mancoosi, we propose to extract from the huge graph a much smaller one,
built out of packages which are in a relationship called strong
dominance (reminiscent of the notion of dominance used by compilers when
analyzing control flow graphs): in practice, the resulting graph of strong
dominators is much smaller and allows to visualize the architecture
of the components of a distribution.
The technical definitions, as
well as a detailed discussion of these notions, can be found in a technical
report titled Strong Dependencies between Software
Components.
This page provides pointers to the
daily analysis of mainstream FOSS distributions provided by Mancoosi as a
service to the FOSS community.
Debian GNU/Linux
We computed strong dominance graphs for all historical
stable releases of
Debian (architecture i386, section main). They are available below, in
PDF format, sorted by reverse chronological order of release.
Lenny |
Etch |
Sarge |
Woody |
Potato |
Slink |
Hamm |
Bo |
Rex |
Buzz |
Strong dominators
