I’ve recently given this talk at RSISE/NICTA at the Australian National University in Canberra.
http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars/more/SID/2990
If somebody at linux Cong AU is interested to have a chat about around these topics, I should be around the entire week. Please drop me a note or look for me on IRC.
ABSTRACT
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) distributions are rather peculiar instances of component-based software platforms. They are developed rapidly and without tight central coordination, they are huge (tens to thousands components per platform), and their importance in the Internet computing infrastructure is growing.
Both the construction of a coherent collection of components and the maintenance of installations based on these raise difficult problems for distribution maintainers and system administrators. Distributions evolve rapidly by releasing new component versions and strive for increasingly high Quality Assurance (QA) requirements on their component collections. System upgrades may proceed on different paths depending on the current state of the system and the available components, and system administrators are faced with difficult choices of upgrade paths and with frequent upgrade failures.
The now concluded project MANCOOSI (Managing the Complexity of the Open Source Infrastructure) aims to solve some of these problems. I will describe current and past work done in the context of MANCOOSI and some future directions.