Finding most used software application by using a time-dependency graph

Bachelor thesis (2022)

Authors

A. Dumitru Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

G. Gousios Software Technology (supervisor 1)
D. Spinellis Software Engineering - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
A. Anand Web Information Systems - EEMCS (supervisor 1)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2022 Alexandru Dumitru
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Published Date

23-06-2022

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Using open-source packages when developing software applications is the general practice among a vast amount of software developers. However, importing open-source code which may depend on other existing technologies may lead to the appearance of a transitive dependency chain. As a result, failure of packages with a high amount of transitive dependants may have an impact on the performance of all dependant applications. This work focuses on designing a graph data structure which maps the dependency relationship between packages as edges, with nodes representing a single version of a certain package. Moreover, the data structure may perform queries based on time intervals, being able to resolve versions in the same manner as a package distributor would. By constructing such data structure, an analysis of the most critical packages for an ecosystem can be conducted. This paper looks mainly into the Debian ecosystem, and searches for applications which are most critical. Based on this paper criticality evaluation, the package dpkg was found to be both most critical and most used in whole Debian's package main repository.