research-article

Why do software packages conflict?

Authors:

Kuniyasu Suzaki,

Roberto Di Cosmo,

Stefano ZacchiroliAuthors Info & Claims

MSR '12: Proceedings of the 9th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

Pages 141 - 150

Published: 02 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Determining whether two or more packages cannot be installed together is an important issue in the quality assurance process of package-based distributions. Unfortunately, the sheer number of different configurations to test makes this task particularly challenging, and hundreds of such incompatibilities go undetected by the normal testing and distribution process until they are later reported by a user as bugs that we call "conflict defects".

We performed an extensive case study of conflict defects extracted from the bug tracking systems of Debian and Red Hat. According to our results, conflict defects can be grouped into five main categories. We show that with more detailed package meta-data, about 30 % of all conflict defects could be prevented relatively easily, while another 30 % could be found by targeted testing of packages that share common resources or characteristics. These results allow us to make precise suggestions on how to prevent and detect conflict defects in the future.

References

[1]

Pietro Abate, Jaap Boender, Roberto Di Cosmo & Stefano Zacchiroli (2009): Strong Dependencies between Soflware Components. In: ESEM 2009, IEEE, pp. 89--99.

Digital Library

[2]

Pietro Abate & Roberto Di Cosmo (2011): Predicting upgrade failures using dependency analysis. In: 27th International Conference on Data Engineering, IEEE, pp. 145--150.

Digital Library

[3]

Alan W. Brown & Kurt C. Wallnau (1998): The Current State of CBSE. IEEE Software 15, pp. 37--46.

Digital Library

[4]

Christian Collberg, John H. Hartman, Sridivya Babu & Sharath K. Udupa (2005): Slinky: Static linking reloaded. In: Proc. USENIX 2005 Annual Technical Conference, USENIX, Anaheim, USA, pp. 309--322.

Digital Library

[5]

Roberto Di Cosmo & Jaap Boender (2010): Using strong conflicts to detect quality issues in component-based complex systems. In: 3rd India software engineering conference, ISEC 2010, ACM, pp. 163--172.

Digital Library

[6]

Roberto Di Cosmo, Paulo Trezentos & Stefano Zacchiroli (2008): Package Upgrades in FOSS Distributions: Details and Challenges. In: International Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades, HotSWUp '08, ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 7:1--7:5.

Digital Library

[7]

Ian Jackson, Iustin Pop & Stefano Zacchiroli: autopkgtest - automatic as-installed package testing. Debian Enhancement Proposal 8: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep8/.

[8]

Ian Jackson & Christian Schwarz (2008): Debian Policy Manual. http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/.

[9]

Fabio Mancinelli, Jaap Boender, Roberto Di Cosmo, Jérôme Vouillon, Berke Durak, Xavier Leroy & Ralf Treinen (2006): Managing the Complexity of Large Free and Open Source Package-Based Software Distributions. In: ASE 2006, IEEE, pp. 199--208.

Digital Library

[10]

Gustavo Noronha Silva (2008): APT HOWTO. http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/.

[11]

Lucas Nussbaum & Stefano Zacchiroli (2010): The Ultimate Debian Database: Consolidating Bazaar Metadata for Quality Assurance and Data Mining. In: 7th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2010), Cape Town, South Africa.

[12]

Leon Presser & John R. White (1972): Linkers and loaders. Computing Surveys (CSUR) 4(3), pp. 149--167.

Digital Library

[13]

The Debian Project: Debian bug tracking system. http://debian.org/Bugs/. Retrieved March 2012.

[14]

The Debian Project: Software packages in {Debian} "sid". http://packages.debian.org/sid/allpackages. Retrieved June 2011.

[15]

Red Hat, Inc.: KVM. http://www.linux-kvm.org.

[16]

Red Hat, Inc.: Red Hat Bugzilla Main Page. http://bugzilla.redhat.com. Retrieved March 2012.

[17]

Murray Stokely (2004): The FreeBSD Handbook, 3 edition. FreeBSD Mall.

Digital Library

[18]

Kuniyasu Suzaki, Toshiki Yagi, Kengo Iijima, Nguyen Anh Quynh, Cyrille Artho & Yoshihito Watanebe (2010): Moving from Logical Sharing of Guest OS to Physical Sharing of Deduplication on Virtual Machine. In: Proc. 5th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Security (HotSec 2010), USENIX, Washington D.C., USA.

Digital Library

[19]

Clemens Szyperski (1998): Component Software. Beyond Object-Oriented Programming. Addison-Wesley.

Digital Library

[20]

Ralf Treinen (2011): EDOS-Debcheck: File Overwrite Errors. http://edos.debian.net/file-overwrites/. Retrieved June 2011.

[21]

Andreas Zeller & Ralf Hildebrandt (2002): Simplifying and Isolating Failure-Inducing Input. Software Engineering 28(2), pp. 183--200.

Digital Library

Cited By

Cheng WHu WMa X(2024)Revisiting Knowledge-Based Inference of Python Runtime Environments: A Realistic and Adaptive ApproachIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.334647450:2(258-279)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3346474
Javan Jafari ACosta DShihab EAbdalkareem R(2023)Dependency Update Strategies and Package CharacteristicsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/360311032:6(1-29)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603110
Dilhara MKetkar ADig D(2021)Understanding Software-2.0ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/345347830:4(1-42)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453478
Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Valor: efficient, software-only region conflict exceptions
OOPSLA 2015: Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications

Data races complicate programming language semantics, and a data race is often a bug. Existing techniques detect data races and define their semantics by detecting conflicts between synchronization-free regions (SFRs). However, such techniques either ...
Valor: efficient, software-only region conflict exceptions
OOPSLA '15

Data races complicate programming language semantics, and a data race is often a bug. Existing techniques detect data races and define their semantics by detecting conflicts between synchronization-free regions (SFRs). However, such techniques either ...
Conflict detection and validation strategies for software transactional memory
DISC'06: Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Distributed Computing

In a software transactional memory (STM) system, conflict detection is the problem of determining when two transactions cannot both safely commit. Validation is the related problem of ensuring that a transaction never views inconsistent data, which ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

MSR '12: Proceedings of the 9th IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

June 2012

262 pages

ISBN:9781467317610

General Chair:
Michele Lanza
University of Lugano, Switzerland
,
Program Chairs:
Massimiliano Di Penta
University of Sannio, Italy
,
Tao Xie
North Carolina State University

Sponsors

SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
University of Zurich: University of Zurich
IEEE CS

Publisher

IEEE Press

Publication History

Published: 02 June 2012

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

ICSE '12

Sponsor:

SIGSOFT
University of Zurich

ICSE '12: 34th International Conference on Software Engineering

June 2 - 3, 2012

Zurich, Switzerland

Upcoming Conference

ICSE 2025

2025 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering

April 26 - May 3, 2025

Ottawa , ON , Canada

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

13
Total Citations
View Citations
141
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)13
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 12 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Cheng WHu WMa X(2024)Revisiting Knowledge-Based Inference of Python Runtime Environments: A Realistic and Adaptive ApproachIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.334647450:2(258-279)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3346474
Javan Jafari ACosta DShihab EAbdalkareem R(2023)Dependency Update Strategies and Package CharacteristicsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/360311032:6(1-29)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603110
Dilhara MKetkar ADig D(2021)Understanding Software-2.0ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/345347830:4(1-42)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453478
Bogart CKästner CHerbsleb JThung F(2021)When and How to Make Breaking ChangesACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/344724530:4(1-56)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3447245
Wang YWen MLiu YWang YLi ZWang CYu HCheung SXu CZhu ZRothermel GBae D(2020)WatchmanProceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3377811.3380426(125-135)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3377811.3380426
Decan AMens TGrosjean P(2019)An empirical comparison of dependency network evolution in seven software packaging ecosystemsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-017-9589-y24:1(381-416)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-017-9589-y
Sánchez ASegura SParejo JRuiz-Cortés A(2017)Variability testing in the wildSoftware and Systems Modeling (SoSyM)10.1007/s10270-015-0459-z16:1(173-194)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10270-015-0459-z
Bogart CKästner CHerbsleb JThung FZimmermann TCleland-Huang JSu Z(2016)How to break an API: cost negotiation and community values in three software ecosystemsProceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/2950290.2950325(109-120)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2950290.2950325
Ahmad WKästner CSunshine JAldrich JKim MRobbes RBird C(2016)Inter-app communication in AndroidProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/2901739.2901762(177-188)Online publication date: 14-May-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2901739.2901762
Claes MMens TDi Cosmo RVouillon JPenta MPinzger MRobbes R(2015)A historical analysis of Debian package incompatibilitiesProceedings of the 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.5555/2820518.2820545(212-223)Online publication date: 16-May-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2820518.2820545
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents