Abstract
Over the years, Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) distributions have become more and more complex and recent versions contain tens of thousands of packages. This has made it impossible to do quality control by hand. Instead, distribution editors must look to automated methods to ensure the quality of their distributions.
In the present paper, we present some insights into the general structure of FLOSS distributions. We notably show that such distributions have the characteristics of a small world network: there are only a few important packages, and many less important packages. Identifying the important packages can help editors focus their efforts on parts of the distribution where errors will have important consequences.
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Notes
- 1.
Queries to the authors of these papers have gone unanswered.
- 2.
This might seem at odds with the fact that there are many less packages in Mandriva than in Debian. The Debian distribution is, hoewever, very extensive and contains many packages not present in Mandriva.
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Acknowledgments
This work is partially supported by the European Community’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), grant agreement n\({}^\circ \)214898, “Mancoosi” project. Work developed at IRILL. This work is also supported by Macao Science and Technology Development Fund (MSTDF), File No. 019/2011/A1.
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Boender, J., Fernandes, S. (2014). Small World Characteristics of FLOSS Distributions. In: Counsell, S., Núñez, M. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8368. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05032-4_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05032-4_30
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