Mancoosi Weblog

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).