Navigating Repositories

Navigating Repositories: Assessing the Impact of External Repositories on Packages in Maven Central

Sandifort, Jelle (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Proksch, S. (mentor)
Huang, S. (mentor)
Poulsen, C.B. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Computer Science and Engineering

CSE3000 Research Project

2024-02-02

This paper presents a comprehensive experimental study on the use and impact of external repositories in the Maven ecosystem. For this research the prevalence, naming patterns, and potential risks associated with external repositories were analyzed. We analyzed 199,188 packages and found that 3.29% of projects employ external repositories. Our findings indicate a decline in the usage of external repositories over time, with one (1.85%) and two (0.72%) external repositories occurring the most. The usage of external repositories has no significant (p < 0.05) effect on the error rate. However, 19.85% of the errors of packages that use an
external repository are caused by one of their external repositories. Moreover, we found that 69.58% of the repository urls were unreachable. 19.31% of the unique ids have two or more different repository urls associated with them. Based on our findings, developers are urged to thoroughly evaluate their usage of external repositories and to consider checking their settings.xml and POM.xml files to
ensure no url or id collisions are prevent or causing unintended behaviour.

Maven
external repositories
repository naming
dependency resovability
artifact repository

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:f38826d3-deb6-4c4c-b2de-4f7fc6b6e0cf

Student theses

bachelor thesis

© 2024 Jelle Sandifort