[IEEE 29th International Conference on Software Engineering - Minneapolis, MN, USA (2007.05.20-2007.05.26)] 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'07) - OPIUM: Optimal Package Install/Uninstall Manager

✍ Scribed by Tucker, Chris; Shuffelton, David; Jhala, Ranjit; Lerner, Sorin

• Book ID: 121845984
• Publisher: IEEE
• Year: 2007
• Weight: 280 KB
• Edition: 1
• Category: Article
• ISBN-13: 9780769528281
• DOI: 10.1109/ICSE.2007.59

✦ Synopsis

Linux distributions often include package management tools such as apt-get in Debian or yum in RedHat. Using information about package dependencies and conflicts, such tools can determine how to install a new package (and its dependencies) on a system of already installed packages. Using off-the-shelf SAT solvers, pseudo-boolean solvers, and Integer Linear Programming solvers, we have developed a new package-management tool, called Opium, that improves on current tools in two ways: (1) Opium is complete, in that if there is a solution, Opium is guaranteed to find it, and (2) 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.