Comparison of PBO solvers in a dependency solving domain

TL;DR

This paper compares various pseudo-Boolean optimization solvers to evaluate their effectiveness in solving the complex dependency resolution problem in Linux package management.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of PBO solvers specifically applied to dependency solving in package managers, highlighting their performance differences.

Findings

Different PBO solvers vary significantly in solving efficiency.

Some solvers outperform others in solving dependency problems.

Results inform better solver selection for package management systems.

Abstract

Linux package managers have to deal with dependencies and conflicts of packages required to be installed by the user. As an NP-complete problem, this is a hard task to solve. In this context, several approaches have been pursued. Apt-pbo is a package manager based on the apt project that encodes the dependency solving problem as a pseudo-Boolean optimization (PBO) problem. This paper compares different PBO solvers and their effectiveness on solving the dependency solving problem.