Improving quality of distributions : EDOS brings new tools

The EDOS project, a R&D project funded by the European Commission under IST FP6 proposes new tools to help enhance the quality of GNU/Linux Distributions.

Roberto Di Cosmo, leader of the project, has presented a paper in WFS 2006 in Porto Alegre, discussing the issue of packages dependencies, and presenting in particular the tools they have developped to check installability problems.

For instance, for Debian, conflicts between packages may lead to uninstallable packages whenever another package is changed (because this conflict relationship works in both directions). Another issue is when a same file path contained in several packages leads to overwritten files, thus conflicts.

For examples of the tools developped, see for instance ARA or ANLA. For instance, in ANLA, we can see that the stable release of Debian contains many uninstallable packages, but most are just depending on a non-free (Java) program, not included in the distribution. What’s surprising though, is that some packages are in different problems, like wzdftpd-mod-perl (check its lifetime in the tool).
What’s interesting is that the formal theory applied in their tools should provide completeness of the quality checks. And furthermore, these tools are really fast, which would allow almost realtime checking of tens of thousands of packages in the distribution (typically 3 minutes for checking everything on a PIII laptop !!!).

For more details, see the following documents : “News from the EDOS Project: Improving the Maintenance of Free Software Distributions“, the paper presented at WFS 2006 (PDF), and the slides of the presentation (to come), and also the more detailed document “Report on Formal Management of Software Dependencies” (Deliverable WP2-D2.2 of the project) (PDF 180 pages).

I have also recorded a video of the presentation at WFS, which should be uploaded here soon.