Analysis of open source operating system evolution: A perspective from package dependency network motif

Abstract

Complexity of open source operating systems constantly increase on account of their widespread application. It is increasingly difficult to understand the collaboration between components in the system. Extant research of open source operating system evolution is mainly achieved by Lehman's law, which is conducted by analyzing characteristics such as line of the source code. Networks, which are utilized to demonstrate relationships among entities, is an adequate model for exploring cooperation of units that form a software system. Software network has become a research hotspot in the field of software engineering, leading to a new viewpoint for us to estimate evolution of open source operating systems. Motif, a connected subgraph that occurs frequently in a network, is extensively used in other scientific research such as bioscience to detect evolutionary rules. Thus, this paper constructs software package dependency network of open source software operating systems and investigates their evolutionary discipline from the perspective of the motif. Results of our experiments, which took Ubuntu Kylin as a study example, indicate a stable evolution of motif change as well as discovering structural defect in that system.