Towards maintainer script modernization in FOSS distributions

TL;DR

This paper presents a process for modernizing maintainer scripts in FOSS distributions by modeling legacy systems to improve upgrade failure handling and rollback capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel process for representing maintainer scripts through meta-models, aiding in upgrade failure management in FOSS distributions.

Findings

Applied to popular FOSS distributions with successful modernization

Enhanced handling of upgrade failures and rollback processes

Demonstrated feasibility of model-based modernization of maintainer scripts

Abstract

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) distributions are complex software systems, made of thousands packages that evolve rapidly, independently, and without centralized coordination. During packages upgrades, corner case failures can be encountered and are hard to deal with, especially when they are due to misbehaving maintainer scripts: executable code snippets used to finalize package configuration. In this paper we report a software modernization experience, the process of representing existing legacy systems in terms of models, applied to FOSS distributions. We present a process to define meta-models that enable dealing with upgrade failures and help rolling back from them, taking into account maintainer scripts. The process has been applied to widely used FOSS distributions and we report about such experiences.