PCART: Automated Repair of Python API Parameter Compatibility Issues

TL;DR

PCART is an automated tool that detects and repairs Python API parameter compatibility issues, addressing a critical gap in software maintenance with high accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces the first fully automated solution for detecting and repairing Python API parameter compatibility issues, including various change types, and evaluates it on a large benchmark.

Findings

Achieves 96.51% F1-score in issue detection

Repair precision of 91.97% on benchmark data

Outperforms existing tools and GPT-4o in effectiveness

Abstract

In modern software development, Python third-party libraries play a critical role, especially in fields like deep learning and scientific computing. However, API parameters in these libraries often change during evolution, leading to compatibility issues for client applications reliant on specific versions. Python's flexible parameter-passing mechanism further complicates this, as different passing methods can result in different API compatibility. Currently, no tool can automatically detect and repair Python API parameter compatibility issues. To fill this gap, we introduce PCART, the first solution to fully automate the process of API extraction, code instrumentation, API mapping establishment, compatibility assessment, repair, and validation. PCART handles various types of Python API parameter compatibility issues, including parameter addition, removal, renaming, reordering, and the conversion of positional to keyword parameters. To evaluate PCART, we construct PCBENCH, a large-scale benchmark comprising 47,478 test cases mutated from 844 parameter-changed APIs across 33 popular Python libraries. Evaluation results demonstrate that PCART is both effective and efficient, significantly outperforming existing tools (MLCatchUp and Relancer) and the large language model ChatGPT (GPT-4o), achieving an F1-score of 96.51% in detecting API parameter compatibility issues and a repair precision of 91.97%. Further evaluation on 30 real-world Python projects from GitHub confirms PCART's practicality. We believe PCART can significantly reduce the time programmers spend maintaining Python API updates and advance the automation of Python API compatibility issue repair.