A Model for Configuration Management of Open Software Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal model for configuration management in open software systems, enabling validation of configurations against specifications for developers and end-users.

Contribution

It extends decision graphs to express specifications and provides a formal type discipline for configuration validation, enhancing reliability in open systems.

Findings

Model effectively validates configurations across versions

Extension of decision graphs for specification expression

Formal type discipline for validation

Abstract

The article proposes a model for the configuration management of open systems. The model aims at validation of configurations against given specifications. An extension of decision graphs is proposed to express specifications. The proposed model can be used by software developers to validate their own configurations across different versions of the components, or to validate configurations that include components by third parties. The model can also be used by end-users to validate compatibility among different configurations of the same application. The proposed model is first discussed in some application scenarios and then formally defined. Moreover, a type discipline is given to formally define validation of a configuration against a system specification