Inter-Package Dependency Networks in Open-Source Software

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structure of inter-package dependency networks in open-source software, revealing they form small-world and scale-free networks, which has implications for understanding software complexity and maintenance.

Contribution

It introduces a high-level network analysis of package dependencies in open-source projects and empirically demonstrates their small-world and scale-free properties.

Findings

Package dependency networks are small-world.

Package dependency networks are scale-free.

Empirical analysis across repositories confirms network properties.

Abstract

This research analyzes complex networks in open-source software at the inter-package level, where package dependencies often span across projects and between development groups. We review complex networks identified at ``lower'' levels of abstraction, and then formulate a description of interacting software components at the package level, a relatively ``high'' level of abstraction. By mining open-source software repositories from two sources, we empirically show that the coupling of modules at this granularity creates a small-world and scale-free network in both instances.