Debian Packages Repositories as Software Product Line Models. Towards Automated Analysis

摘要

The automated analysis of variability models ingeneral and feature models in particular is a thriving researchtopic. There have been numerous contributions along the lasttwenty years in this area including both, research papers andtools. However, the lack of realistic variability models to evaluatethose techniques and tools is recognized as a major problemby the community. To address this issue, we looked for large–scale variability models in the open source community. We foundthat the Debian package dependency language can be interpretedas software product line variability model. Moreover, we foundthat those models can be automatically analysed in a softwareproduct line variability model-like style. In this paper, we takea first step towards the automated analysis of Debian packagedependency language. We provide a mapping from these modelsto propositional formulas. We also show how this could allowus to perform analysis operations on the repositories like thedetection of anomalies (e.g. packages that cannot be installed).