sem2009/abstracts/treinen

5/3/09 Ralf Treinen (PPS)

Mancoosi: research topics in component-based software

Free and Open Source Software distributions are a particularly interesting instance of component-based software, due to their distributed development mode, their importance for today's computing infrastructure, and to their size. Both the construction of a coherent collection of components, and the maintenance of software installations based on these, raise difficult problems for distribution editors and system administrators: Distributions evolve rapidly by integrating new versions of software packages that are independently developed. System upgrades may proceed on different paths depending on the current state of a system and the available software packages, and system administrators are faced with choices of upgrade paths, and possibly with failing upgrades.

The ongoing Mancoosi project (Managing the Complexity of the Open Source Infrastructure) aims to solve some of these problems. In this talk we will describe past and ongoing work in the context of Mancoosi and its predecessor project EDOS, as well as some possible future research directions.