Mancoosi Weblog

On September 7-11 2009, in Oxford UK, will take place the XtreemOS Summer School. XtreemOS is a Linux-based operating systems that includes Grid functionalities, developed by an international consortium with which we share Edge-IT as a partner.

On June 4th and 5th 2009, the Mancoosi meeting originally planned in L'Aquila was organized in Rome in the premises of the Sapienza University of Rome, thanks to the efforts of our colleagues in L'Aquila despite the difficult circumstances. This was the opportunity of another fruitful project meeting (see agenda) with presentations of work carried on lately, close collaboration and discussions on the future of the project.

To be continued!

Support ideas for L'Aquila

The organization of the 1st workshop on Open Component Ecosystems (IWOCE 2009) is now in place. The workshop is intimately related to the topics of interest of Mancoosi (the ecosystem of packages in FOSS distributions) and generalizes them for a wider audience. Roberto and Paola will be chairing it and we are confident in the interest of several nearby research communities.

The Call for Papers is now ready: we have just started to send it out to lists of potentially interested people. Do not hesitate in spreading the news ... and in preparing submissions if you are interested in the workshop topics!

A new version of MANCOOSI's distribution toolkit dose2 has been released - version 1.4.

Its main new feature is speed. It is now possible to prepare the SAT encoding of repositories in advance and reuse it for multiple computations, which can dramatically speed up computation of (amongst others) strong dependencies.

Another improvement is that it is now possible to read Debian Packages.bz2 or .gz files directly, without having to unzip them first.

There have been quite a few bugfixes as well.

Together with this new version of dose2, there are new releases of pkglab and ceve. The improvements there are mostly incremental; pkglab has some new functions (to compute the shortest dependency path between two packages, for example, or to show all available versions of a given unit), and ceve now has the possibility to output the SAT encoding of a repository in the widely used DIMACS format.

All this is up for grabs on the SODIAC project page here.

The title of this post is, by my (very limited) knowledge of Japanese script, Mancoosi written in Japanese (it is written in the katana script which is used in Japanese for foreign words). This to announce that I have been invited to give a talk about the Mancoosi project at the the Workshop on Software and Verification (WSV 2009) on Friday, April 10, at AIST Kansai in Osaka. I have it from trustworthy source that the second talk of the workshop will be given by Yutaka Niibe, the founder and president of the Free Software Initiative Japan on the responsibilities of Free Software, though from looking at the program I couldn't have told :-) I hope to report soon more here about Free Software in Japan!

From March 31st to April 2nd, the annual Open Source fair held in Paris, Solutions Linux, was the occasion for hte visitor to cross members of several european research projects related to Free and Open Source Software, like XtreemOS, and, of course, Mancoosi. A kind journalist from VNUNet asked me to give a short presentation of the project, and here is the video interview (in French).

After having published a while ago the specification of CUDF (a common format language to describe the syntax and semantics of upgrade problems in a distribution-independent way), we are finally read to announce the first library implementing it. Yay.

The library is called libCUDF and implements both the syntax (i.e., the ability to read and write files in CUDF format) and semantics of CUDF. This means that, for example, you can check whether upgrade solutions match upgrade problems, or whether a given package installation represented in CUDF is consistent (contains no "broken packages", in the APT lingo). Actually, these common abilities are available also as a command line utility, called cudf-checker.

The library is implemented in OCaml, but bindings for C are also available, hence you can use it form pretty much anywhere.

You can download the library from the (new!) software section of the Mancoosi website.

Debian packages will be available soon in the Mancoosi package repository, but if you cannot hold your breath you can check out the SVN version, where a debianized source tree is already available.

On January 8th and 9th, 2009, due to particularly bad weather conditions, the partners of the MANCOOSI project took refuge in Nice. This was the opportunity to have another MANCOOSI project meeting. Indeed, the heavy meeting agenda (see agenda) did not let enough free time for the project members to take a swim in the sea. We carried on serious work on many different work package issues and had a lot of fruitful discussions. The meeting helped clarify and solve many project issues and gave us a better picture of the work left.

A paper related with the Mancoosi project was recently presented at the 15th RCRA workshop on Experimental Evaluation of Algorithms for Solving Problems with Combinatorial Explosion, which took place in Udine, Italy, on 12-13 December 2008. The paper was co-authored by Josep Argelich and myself and studies different SAT-based approaches for tackling the installation of software packages. We were able to evaluate the hardness of these instances and what is required to solve the conflicts between packages with the smallest impact. The next step will be extending this approach to the upgradeability problem, making use of the instances that are being produced in the Mancoosi project.

On October 6th and 7th took place in sunny Lisbon a Mancoosi project meeting. The agenda included talks describing the work already developed in the context of the project by the different partners. There was plenty of time for discussion and to define future research and development directions. The project is beginning to take shape and all our efforts go now to putting into action the results of the meeting.

The next meeting is scheduled for January 2009 and will be held in Nice.

On october 20, 21 and 22 took place in Malaga the Open Source World Conference that attracted quite a large and diverse public, on all aspects of Free and Open Source Software. One of the many tracks was devoted to FOSS projects funded by the European Community, and I gave an overall presentation of the Mancoosi project. It was quite refreshing to participate in an free software event with so many young people around, and the organisation of the conference was absolutely impressive. I think we'll be back next year with some more concrete results to show.

Me and Paulo have just came back from HotSWUp'08, the first ACM workshop on hot topics on software upgrades. There we have presented a paper about co-authored by we two and Roberto. (Remember that, more generally, you can find a good deal of Mancoosi-related papers in the papers section of the main Mancoosi website.)

The (position) paper was about generalities in package upgrades (and their frequent failures!) as experienced in package-based FOSS distributions; interestingly enough, such details have not been properly presented thus far to the interested scientific communities. We believe our work contributed in closing the gap! In addition to the characterization, we point out some problems in state of the art counter measure to upgrade failures. Of course we also hint at the research directions Mancoosi is pursuing to have better upgrade support in future package managers.

The workshop was a pleasant experience and it was very well organized (which is not to be taken for granted in first editions of workshops...); kudos to the organizers for that. Nevertheless, I wasn't expecting to see that there are two big threads in the research community about software upgrades. On one hand there are people working on upgrades in the Mancoosi sense (i.e., how to deploy software on user machines, exploiting the abstraction of packages). On the other there is a huge amount of work on how to upgrade live systems, e.g., how to upgrade the code of a network service, without shutting down the service.

Of course the ideal target is having both safe software deployments and live software upgrades, we simply aren't there yet ...

In the meantime Mancoosi will do its best to address the first part of the issue!

The official press releases describing Mancoosi, in several languages, are now available online:

• English
• Français
• Italiano
• Portugues

A small Mancoosi-squad (me and Ralf) attended DebConf8, the 9th international conference of Debian project developers.

I delivered a talk about Mancoosi: it is a presentation about EDOS achievements and Mancoosi roadmap, with a particular focus on relationships with the Debian project. Beside that, and as usual for DebConf, several interesting ideas popped up by simply talking with people: edos-builddebchheck has been implemented and work is going on to integrate edos-debcheck with several tools (dput, wanna-build, and Ubuntu's soyouz).

A related news is that we now have a papers section on the Mancoosi website. It contains information about papers and presentations delivered about Mancoosi, and also includes slides of the delivered presentation. For example, you can find there both the slides of the DebConf8 talk, and those of an earlier project presentation delivered in July at the University of Lugano (Switzerland). Enjoy the read!

Our first deliverable, the Mancoosi Project Presentation, is out: you can find it online here, and it contains a detailed presentation of what we plan to do, how we plan to do it, and who we are. For people expert in European administrativia, this is basically a revised version of the Description Of Work of the Mancoosi project.