Server-Side Computation of Package Dependencies in Package-Management Systems

Abstract

Package managers are often used in recent software development to obtain directly-dependent packages recursively. Typically, package managers make requests to the package registry more than once when computing indirect dependencies. Moreover, much amount of computations are duplicated by clients of package managers. This duplication can be avoided by computing indirect dependencies in advance on the server-side of package-management systems. Therefore, we propose two algorithms functioning in parallel on the server-side: one to compute the indirect dependencies when copying all packages in existing package managers to the server and one to add packages to the server. Based on these parallelized algorithms, we implement a server fpms-server and a client fpms for npm packages. By our experiments, our client obtains dependencies of some package more than two times faster than clients in existing npm and yarn systems.