The next 16 of april in hannover at the hotswup workshop we’ll present a joint work with Roberto Di Cosmo prepared in the context of the mancoosi project. Since we used debian for our experiments, we’re also very much interested in the feedback from the community regarding our method. However keep in mind that this is still work in progress and to be considered as research more then a proposal for a concrete application. This is part of our on-going effort of exploring different areas with the goal of providing tools and ideas to enhance the quality of FOSS distributions.
Abstract
Upgrades in component based systems can disrupt other components. Being able to predict the possible consequence of an upgrade just by analyzing inter-component dependencies can avoid errors and downtime. In this paper we precisely identify in a repository the components p whose upgrades force a large set of others components to be upgraded. We are also able to discriminate whether all the future versions of p have the same impact, or whether there are different classes of future versions that have different impacts. We perform our analysis on Debian, one of the largest FOSS distributions.
you can find more info about this paper here