Mancoosi Weblog

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!