A First Look at Package-to-Group Mechanism: An Empirical Study of the Linux Distributions
Dongming Jin, Nianyu Li, Kai Yang, Minghui Zhou, Zhi Jin

TL;DR
This empirical study investigates the package-to-group (P2G) mechanism in Linux distributions, revealing its increasing adoption, evolutionary patterns, and impact on package management efficiency, supported by analysis of thousands of groups and packages.
Contribution
First comprehensive empirical analysis of the P2G mechanism in Linux distributions, introducing the GValue metric and identifying key adoption and evolution patterns.
Findings
P2G adoption is increasing in popular Linux distributions.
Six evolutionary patterns of P2G groups were identified.
Packages not managed through P2G tend to remain in distributions.
Abstract
Reusing third-party software packages is a common practice in software development. As the scale and complexity of open-source software (OSS) projects continue to grow (e.g., Linux distributions), the number of reused third-party packages has significantly increased. Therefore, maintaining effective package management is critical for developing and evolving OSS projects. To achieve this, a package-to-group mechanism (P2G) is employed to enable unified installation, uninstallation, and updates of multiple packages at once. To better understand this mechanism, this paper takes Linux distributions as a case study and presents an empirical study focusing on its application trends, evolutionary patterns, group quality, and developer tendencies. By analyzing 11,746 groups and 193,548 packages from 89 versions of 5 popular Linux distributions and conducting questionnaire surveys with Linux…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Data Storage Technologies · Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies · Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems
