Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 4th Jun 2007 16:38 UTC, submitted by anonymous
"We have developed a new package-management tool, called Opium, that improves on current tools in two ways: Opium is complete, in that if there is a solution, Opium is guaranteed to find it, and Opium can optimize a user-provided objective function, which could for example state that smaller
packages should be preferred over larger ones. We performed a comparative study of our tool against Debian's apt-get on 600 traces of real-world package installations. We show that Opium runs fast enough to be usable,
and that its completeness and optimality guarantees provide
concrete benefits to end users."
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Member since:
2006-06-19
Confused....was this a study done on *spire or on Debian? I could of swore that *spire use to claim that CNR did not even use apt - so which is it? I think any study related to apt should be done on debian.
In our experiments, we discovered a real user trace where an install attempt for OCaml using apt-get caused 61 packages to be removed, including the Linux kernel This poor user would not be able to reboot their machine after installing OCaml.
I am not familiar with any issue on Debian about installing Ocaml and it removing the kernel and 60 packages? Anyone else? Oh, that poor user!
Was this done using Debians repository or Linspires warehouse? I am not sure if using the Linspire repository is the best test case for a study since iirc they like to mix packages from various debian flavors and make it a bit messy. Then again, maybe it is the perfect test for OPIUM but I am not sure it is reflective of the nature of apt either. Anyone else?
He also has a pdf slideshow presentation on his site -
http://www.cjtucker.com/ICSE_Presentation.pdf
Oh and it was also a Linspire Letter
http://www.linspire.com/linspire_letter_archives.php?id=46
Is he basically saying that apt is broke? I wonder why so many distros use apt and go for a debian base if apt is such a horrible tool?
Is this just a marketing tool to sell the *new and improved* CNR?
Edited 2007-06-04 17:25