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:
2006-01-02
For the research questions asked in the paper, whatever software is in the repository does not really matter, it could be all empty packages with nothing in there, except the metadata.
The paper is a rather interesting contribution, given that completeness & optimality are not in general questions that are on the feature list of package/repository management tools. And I think the use of formal methods is rather novel in the field, as well.