Debian Packages Repositories as Software Product Line Models. Towards Automated Analysis

Abstract

The automated analysis of variability models in general and feature models in particular is a thriving research topic. There have been numerous contributions along the last twenty years in this area including both, research papers and tools. However, the lack of realistic variability models to evaluate those techniques and tools is recognized as a major problem by the community. To address this issue, we looked for large– scale variability models in the open source community. We found that the Debian package dependency language can be interpreted as software product line variability model. Moreover, we found that those models can be automatically analysed in a software product line variability model-like style. In this paper, we take a first step towards the automated analysis of Debian package dependency language. We provide a mapping from these models to propositional formulas. We also show how this could allow us to perform analysis operations on the repositories like the detection of anomalies (e.g. packages that cannot be installed).