Supporting the Evolution of Free and Open Source Software Distributions

This paper overviews Mancoosi, an European project in the 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission, on managing software complexity. The focus of the project has been on managing the evolution of Free and Open Source Software distributions. Evolution of these distributions is realized through the upgrade, the addition, and the removal of software packages. The project has two main objectives: (i) develop a model-based approach to safely support the upgrade of FOSS systems, (ii) develop better algorithms and tools to plan upgrade paths based on various information sources about software packages and on optimization criteria. The paper focuses on the first objective of the project. The main result of this objective is an approach that promotes the simulation of upgrades to predict failures before affecting the real system. Both fine-grained static aspects (e.g., configuration incoherences) and dynamic aspects (e.g., the execution of configuration scripts) are taken into account, improving over the state of the art of package managers.