Easing Software Component Repository Evolution ∗ Jérôme Vouillon Mehdi Dogguy Roberto Di Cosmo CNRS, PPS UMR 7126, EDF S.A., France, Univ Paris Diderot, Univ Paris Diderot, Debian Release Team, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Sorbonne Paris Cité, France Debian Project PPS, UMR 7126 CNRS,
[email protected] [email protected] INRIA, France paris-diderot.fr
[email protected] ABSTRACT source software (FOSS). These components are usually made Modern software systems are built by composing compo- available via a repository, which are storage locations from nents drawn from large repositories, whose size and com- which they can be retrieved. A large variety of repositories plexity increase at a fast pace. Maintaining and evolving are available, ranging from specialised ones for components these software collections is a complex task, and a strict written in a given programming language, like CPAN, Hack- qualification process needs to be enforced. We studied in age or PyPI, application-specific ones, like the Eclipse Plu- depth the Debian software repository, one of the largest and gin collection [13], and more general repositories like Maven most complex existing ones, and we developed comigrate, Central [6] or most GNU/Linux distributions. All these an extremely efficient tool that is able to identify the largest component repositories share the common concern of organ- sets of components that can migrate to the reference reposi- ising the process of integrating changes: new components tory without violating its quality constraints. This tool out- are regularly added (Debian grew by more than 8000 pack- performs significantly existing tools, and provides detailed ages since the last stable release two years ago), outdated information that is crucial to understand the reasons why versions are being replaced by more recent ones, and super- some components cannot migrate.