The results of the MISC competition 2011 were announced during the Workshop LoCoCo in Perugia Monday 12th of September.

The winners are : for the track ”’paranoid”’ and ”’trendy”’ the solver aspuncud, a solver based on an experimental version of clasp with iterative unsatisfiable core elimination by Oliver Matheis. and for the track ”’user”’ the solver gj-user-solver, a refactored SAT4J with a custom Pseudo Boolean Optimisation algorithm by Graham Jenson.

The novelty of this year was the introduction of a new aggregation function to the user track that can be used to maximize or minimize the numerical value or a cudf property.

All competing solvers were able to provide an answer the large majority of problems. Performances were used to break a few ties this year, and we can clearly see that solvers are getting faster and faster. Now most solvers are able to answer a ‘common’ installation problem under 3 seconds (see for example the solver aspuncud in the sub category dudf-real of the paranoid track) providing at the same time an optimal solution w.r.t. the chosen optimization criteria.

We received a positive feedback from all participants despite a small glitch in our ranking function. We definitely looking forward to establish MISC as an international solver competition for the next few years.

Recently, all relevant packages needed to run mpm (the mancoosi package manager) landed in debian (thanks ralf and zack !). Now it should be a tad easier to run mpm and to play with it. The code of mpm is available on the mancoosi svn repository (user/pass : mancoosi/mancoosi) . To run it, you also need to install python-apt.

These are all cudf solvers you can use as mpm backends. They use different solving techniques and were implemented for the MISC competition : mccs packup * aspcud

In addition, you need the CUDF solver integration for APT / MPM , that is the component in charge of translating the apt/mpm installation problem to cudf and to provide a solution back to apt/mpm * apt-cudf

The last (optional) component is the dudf-save that allows you to report an installation problem back to us . mancoosi contest (dudfsave) is avalaible for download at http://mancoosi.debian.net/

the mpm command line is still not very user friendly, but since it is not meant to be used by final users or production systems, I think I’ll not spend too much time to add all bells and whistles.

enjoy.

One of our paper has been accepted to The 14th International ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE-2011) happening in June in Boulder, Colorado, USA. This is a joint work with Roberto Di Cosmo, Ralf Treinen and Stefano Zacchiroli.

Abstract

Software distributions in the FOSS world rely on so-called package managers for the installation and removal of packages on target machines. State-of-the-art package managers are monolithic in architecture, and each of them is hard-wired to an ad-hoc dependency solver implementing a customized heuristics. In this paper we propose a modular architecture allowing for pluggable dependency solvers and backends. We argue that this is the path that leads to the next generation of package managers that will deliver better results, accept more expressive input languages, and can be easily adaptable to new platforms. We present a working prototype—-called MPM—-which has been implemented following the design advocated in this paper.

More details about the paper are available here

UPDATE

Ralf (that went all the way to the US to present the paper) has just informed us that the paper won the ‘ACM Sigsoft Distinguished Paper Award’ !!!!!!!!

Thanks to Ralf’s work, dose3 has been just accepted in debian experimental !!! yuppiiiii \o/

Dose3 is a framework made of several OCaml libraries for managing distribution packages and their dependencies.

Though not tied to any particular distribution, dose3 constitutes a pool of libraries which enable analyzing packages coming from various distributions.

Besides basic functionality for querying and setting package properties, dose3 also implements algorithms for solving more complex problems (monitoring package evolutions, correct and complete dependency resolution, repository-wide uninstallability checks).

For the ocaml affectionados the API of the library is available here (there is still a bit of work to do here…) . The source code shipped in each release does not include a vast range of applications sitting in the experimental directory. You can have a look at these in our svn.

if you want to get a copy of the development / bleeding edge / unstable version from svn, you can check it out from the svn

svn co https://gforge.info.ucl.ac.be/svn/mancoosi/trunk/dose3

user/pass : mancoosi/mancoosi

After a bit of work, today I decided to start using mpm, the mancoosi package manager, to upgrade my laptop. My first use of it on a production system - until now I run all my experiments in throw-away virtual machines - and it works !

Not rocket science here. During the last month David Kalnischkies (of APT fame) visited our offices in Paris and together with zack worked out a communication protocol between apt-get and the mancoosi cudf solvers (EDSP). I guess somebody is going to announce all details about this endeavor soon. This cooperation enabled us to advance in the integration of apt-get and the mancoosi technology.

Reusing the same protocol, and backend I developed to translate the apt problem to cudf (and to call a suitable solver), I’ve re-wrote large part of mpm and added the possibility to generate the installation plan before calling dpkg and really installing the selected packages.

Below notice the intermediate calls as Inject Model , Simulate, Compare Models . These are at the moment stubs that are going to call the simulation framework developed at mancoosi.

The food :

abate@zed.fr:~/Projects/git-svn-repos/mpm$sudo ./mpm.py -c mpm.conf update
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Inject Model ...


abate@zed.fr:~/Projects/git-svn-repos/mpm$sudo ./mpm.py -c mpm.conf upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following new packages will be installed:
libtracker-client-0.8-0 libnet-ip-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl libasyncns0 libapr1 
5 to install
Simulate
Proceed ? yes/[no] 
yes
Reading package fields... Done
Reading package status... Done
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
Reading changelogs... Done
apt-listchanges: Mailing root: apt-listchanges: changelogs for zed
Reading package fields... Done
Reading package status... Done
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
Reading changelogs... Done
apt-listchanges: Mailing root: apt-listchanges: changelogs for zed
(Reading database ... 179534 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace libapr1 1.4.2-8 (using .../libapr1_1.4.4-1_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libapr1 ...
Preparing to replace libasyncns0 0.8-1 (using .../libasyncns0_0.8-2_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libasyncns0 ...
Preparing to replace libio-socket-ssl-perl 1.40-1 (using .../libio-socket-ssl-perl_1.43-1_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libio-socket-ssl-perl ...
Preparing to replace libnet-ip-perl 1.25-2 (using .../libnet-ip-perl_1.25-3_all.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libnet-ip-perl ...
Preparing to replace libtracker-client-0.8-0 0.8.17-2 (using .../libtracker-client-0.8-0_0.8.18-1_amd64.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libtracker-client-0.8-0 ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up libapr1 (1.4.4-1) ...
Setting up libasyncns0 (0.8-2) ...
Setting up libio-socket-ssl-perl (1.43-1) ...
Setting up libnet-ip-perl (1.25-3) ...
Setting up libtracker-client-0.8-0 (0.8.18-1) ...
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/gnome/help: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/omf: 0 KiB

Total disk space freed by localepurge: 0 KiB

localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/locale: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/man: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/gnome/help: 0 KiB
localepurge: Disk space freed in /usr/share/omf: 0 KiB

Total disk space freed by localepurge: 0 KiB

Inject Model ...
Compare Models ...
abate@zed.fr:~/Projects/git-svn-repos/mpm$

Reg the installation plan, this is an xml file that will be passed to a simulator developed by the university of L’Aquila to make sure that the installation script (well, a model of them), will not cause any problem during the installation.

The format is a very simple xml file as follows :

<selectionStates>
 <selectionState type="Install"> 
  <param name="package" value="libapr1" />
  <param name="version" value="1.4.4-1" /> 
  <param name="architecture" value="amd64" />
 </selectionState>
 <selectionState type="Install">
  <param name="package" value="libasyncns0" />
  <param name="version" value="0.8-2" />
  <param name="architecture" value="amd64" />
 </selectionState>
 <selectionState type="Install">
  <param name="package" value="libio-socket-ssl-perl" />
  <param name="version" value="1.43-1" />
  <param name="architecture" value="all" />
 </selectionState>
[...]

Soon APT will ship a patch to use the very same infrastructure of mpm (yeii !!!). This will on one hand make mpm useless as package manager on its own. It is a simple hack in python and I never tough to compete with its big brothers. On the other hand I think it will stand as a nice workbench to experiment with new ideas, to prototype new features and to make it easier for poeple that are not c++ experts to play with the APT library (thanks to python-apt) in a semi structured environment. The code is in the mancoosi svn if you want to have a look.