Mancoosi Weblog

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.

It was recently brought to my attention that Embedded Debian (Emdebian) is extensively using edos-debcheck for quality assurance purposes.

edos-debcheck is probably one of the most representative utilities of the whole EDOS toolchain: it can be fed with package lists (such as apt's Packages file, in the case of Debian) and asked to check whether some (or even all) packages have unsatisfiable dependencies. If this is the case, something is probably wrong with the distribution represented by the input package list, as it is distributing packages its user will never be able to install.

edos-debcheck is being used in Debian as well, but the use Emdebian is making of it is quite peculiar. Indeed the Emdebian people are using edos-debcheck before an actual upload of bunch of packages to ensure a priori that broken dependencies won't hit the Emdebian archive.

While this would be harder to achieve in Debian (as the uploader as less control on the upload chain, think for example at Packages stuck in NEW: the package universe can change sensibly between the moment they are uploaded and the moment they actually hit the archive), there is room for adding at least some warning at upload time.

Building on the Emdebian scripts, we are working on adding support for such additional checks to dput (the main upload utility used by Debian Developers), probably by the means of pluggable external hook.

From 13 to 15 June, pkgsrcCon 2008 was held at the Technical University of Berlin, and MANCOOSI was there!

We presented our tools, and afterwards there was a good discussion about adapting them for pkgsrc. Look for pkgsrc support in the EDOS and MANCOOSI tools soon!

Being the natural evolution of EDOS, Mancoosi also aims at providing maintenance for the various tools and software developed during its predecessor. In this respect, a lot of work is going on under the hood: stay tuned, we'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, to whet your appetite, we have resurrected the Debian weather service. Looking at it you can get an idea of how the weather will be on a given Debian distribution and architecture. Would it be a good idea to go out today (i.e. perform an install/upgrade attempt) hoping in clear sky (i.e. low uninstallable package count), or would it be better to stay in bed waiting for the storm (i.e. high uninstallable package count) to fade away? Check your Debian weather now to see it!

Daniel points out that Maven is moving to SAT-solver technology too, and this is a second level offspring of EDOS, as it is inspired by the Eclipse P2 project we posted about last week.

So, good ideas travel fast!

One word of warning though for people out there following on the original EDOS ideas:

• we are not necessarily asking that you mention EDOS (that introduced all these ideas back in 2005) all the time (we kind of know that this spoils business advertising a bit); it would be kind to do it once in a while, though :-)
• please get in touch with us at Mancoosi, so we can make sure that the problem description format we are working on for the competition properly encompasses your usage cases, so you will be able to benefit from the competition results.

We have been interacting during EDOS with Daniel Le Berre, when the EDOS WP2 team first pointed out in 2005 that SAT solvers where the right tools to use to check for installability, solving dependencies and conflicts, of software packages in a GNU/Linux distribution.

But software components come in different flavours, and the very same problem arises in a wealth of other fields, so it has been a real pleasure to learn during the Mancoosi meeting in Paris this week that Sat4j (Daniel's SAT solver) will eventually become a part of the P2 project in Eclipse.

This is proof that we are heading in the right direction, as Industry is listening to Academia.

It is also wonderful news for Mancoosi, as we will have lots of potential new participants in the international solver competition which is one of the component of our project.

On May 26th and 27th the first Mancoosi workshop has been held in Paris, with a well packed agenda.

The main goal was to recap the significant EDOS results, review significant related work, and have a few discussions on the work we are doing in the 4 technical workpackages.

We were more than twenty people, and the interaction was useful and intense.

Look forward for the forthcoming deliverables of the project in the next few months!

Welcome to the Mancoosi blog. What is Mancoosi? Let's start with the basics: you pronounce it /mancusi/ in International Phonetic Alphabet.

Then, the meaning: the acronym stands for "MANaging the COmplexity of the Open Source Infrastructure", and the name already says a lot... we are gathering together researchers and free software distribution editors (both from the .deb and .rpm worlds) to produce a next generation set of algorithms to smooth the upgrade process of package based systems. Some of us already provided quite significant contributions in the framework of the EDOS project.

Finally, some administrativia: Mancoosi is a STREP partially funded by the European Community, in the Call 1 of FP7 Objective 1.2. Yes, EC does contribute to improving free software quality :-)

If you want to know more, you can peruse the Mancoosi website, that contains, in web-friendly form, all the information on goals, partners and background.

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