EDOS-tools tutorial: EDOS tools for linux distributions dependencies management and quality assurance

Abstract

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) distributions are the results of the effort of third party actors in collecting independently developed software products, in a consistent and usable form. The widespread adoption of these distributions as infrastructural components in many strategic contexts of the information technology society has drawn the attention on the issues regarding how to handle the complexity of assembling and managing a huge number of (packaged) components and how to guarantee their quality. This tutorial will describe how the EDOS project has tackled these issues. First it will describe the problems related to the quality assurance of Linux distributions and will present the tools that have been developed to manage testing process. It will then introduce the problems that occur when managing inter-package relations in large package repositories and will showcase tools that can be used to analyze and manage large package repositories. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.