Solving Package Management via Hypergraph Dependency Resolution

TL;DR

HyperRes introduces a formal hypergraph-based system that enables interoperability and precise dependency resolution across multiple package management ecosystems without requiring users to change their package managers.

Contribution

It presents HyperRes, a novel formal system that models cross-ecosystem dependency resolution using hypergraphs and demonstrates its applicability to existing package managers.

Findings

HyperRes can translate and resolve dependencies across diverse package ecosystems.

Dependency resolution across ecosystems is feasible without changing existing package managers.

The system supports environment-specific dependency solving.

Abstract

Package managers are everywhere, with seemingly every language and operating system implementing their own solution. The lack of interoperability between these systems means that multi-lingual projects are unable to express precise dependencies across language ecosystems, and external system and hardware dependencies are typically implicit and unversioned. We define HyperRes, a formal system for describing versioned dependency resolution using a hypergraph that is expressive enough to model many ecosystems and solve dependency constraints across them. We define translations from dozens of existing package managers to HyperRes and comprehensively demonstrate that dependency resolution can work across ecosystems that are currently distinct. This does not require users to shift their choice of package managers; instead, HyperRes allows for the translation of packaging metadata between ecosystems, and for solving to be precisely specialised to a particular deployment environment.