Section: New Results

Formal management of package dependencies

Participants : Roberto Di Cosmo, Ralf Treinen [University Paris Diderot] , Jaap Boender [University Paris Diderot] , Pietro Abate [University Paris Diderot] , Jerôme Vouillon [University Paris Diderot] , Stefano Zacchiroli [University Paris Diderot] .

Roberto Di Cosmo's current main line of research is the study and analysis of large component-based software repositories, in particular GNU/Linux-based distributions. These distributions consists of collections of dozens of thousands of software packages, together with metadata, installation and configuration tools, and a variety of different production processes, involving quality assurance at several levels.

Ensuring quality of software assemblies built using these components is a challenging issue: the simple question of knowing whether a single component can or not be deployed turns out to be NP-complete, and yet industry needs to deploy components all the time.

The research currently conducted within the Mancoosi FP7 european project, coordinated by Roberto Di Cosmo, adresses some of the relevant issues, by elaborating sophisticated deployment algorithms and designing specialised installation and configuration languages targeted at enabling transactional capabilities in the tools used to maintain software assemblies built out of GNU/Linux based distributions.

The results of this project are available at http://www.mancoosi.org/ and include four publications this year: one at the CBSE conference [18] , which received an ACM distinguished paper award; one at the FSE conference [23] , which received an ACM distinguished artifact award; one in the Science of Computer Programming journal [12] ; and one at the workshop on Logics for Component Configuration [22] .