Stefano Zacchiroli (PPS)

Formal approaches to the upgrade of component-based systems

http://upsilon.cc/~zack

Abstract: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) distributions are rather peculiar instances of component-based software platforms. They are developed rapidly and without tight central coordination, they are huge (tens to thousands components per platform), and their importance in the Internet computing infrastructure is growing.

Both the construction of a coherent collection of components and the maintenance of installations based on these raise difficult problems for distribution maintainers and system administrators. Distributions evolve rapidly by releasing new component versions and strive for increasingly high Quality Assurance (QA) requirements on their component collections. System upgrades may proceed on different paths depending on the current state of the system and the available components, and system administrators are faced with difficult choices of upgrade paths and with frequent upgrade failures.

The ongoing project MANCOOSI (Managing the Complexity of the Open Source Infrastructure) aims to solve some of these problems. We will describe current and past work done in the context of MANCOOSI, as well as future research directions to scale from the single-system case to the multi-system and "cloud" cases.