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:
2007-06-04
OPIUM isn't a full package manager, it's a dependency analysis algorithm designed to plug in to existing package managers (in particular, APT). The paper is a research piece exploring the algorithm; hopefully the community will find value in it and we can look at integrating it into APT in the future. It certainly doesn't aim to replace apt-get entirely, only the portion of it that computes dependencies. Because the paper was targeted at an academic, not an industrial, audience, this kind of implementation mechanism was not covered in it. However, if you read the paper you'll be able to see very quickly what we do and do not deal with.