Program for WP2 meeting of November 29th, 2005

Program for WP2 meeting of November 29th, 2005

The venue is 175 Rue du Chevaleret, in Paris, near the Chevaleret stop of Metro line number 6.

In the morning we will meet in room 5C14 (aka Verdier), located on the fifth floor.

In the afternoon, we will move to another room, that we will announce later.

Morning Session:

9h45 : arrival of the participants

10h00 : short report on the WP2 review

10h15 : overview of WP2 tasks and goals

• Task 1: automatic tracking from sources?: leader = ? - strong connection with WP4 activity, same solution via unified subscription model
  • survey of existing solutions (see Conary for example)
  • statistics from log-files (WP4/WP5) concerning pattern of source package distributions
• Task 2: dependency analysis?: leader = Roberto
  • level 0 consistency analysis (pointwise) (completed)
  • level 1 consistency analysis (setwise)
    • statistics of distribution evolution --> TODO/ongoing, need leader
    • efficient algorithms to detect changes in maximal coinstallable sets: we need to take into account the full complexity of the metadata, including Replace, Obsoletes etc.
    • tracing "errors" to their origins/authors.
• Task 3: automatic thinning?: leader =
  • usual package dependencies are generated for installing a package on a running distribution
  • producing a new distribution from scratch needs more than standard dependencies
    • survey of the existing methods (Categories, like "Essential" in Debian, etc.)
    • seems nevertheless a rather simple task (algorithmically)
• Task 4: automatic rebuilding from scratch (need leaders)?: leader =
  • precise formal definition of the problem: we want to create a binary distribution able to reproduce the binary packages out of the distributed source packages (in theoretical terms, we want a fixed point)
    • survey of existing methods
    • practical experimentation to discover the actual problems...
  • another problem is to be able to easily rebuild the building environment necessary to produce a given binary package (this might be quite tricky, as the library used when building a binary package may be automatically detected/selected by the configure script; this also has consequences on how difficult it might be to rebuild binaries from sources that match the ones in the distribution).
• Transversal: metadata description/analysis?: leader = Fabio - We need a clear view of the relationship with work done in other WP. Notably, we have
  • statistics to collect (size/distribution of dependency cones), this must be shared with
    • WP4: they use it to cluster users
    • WP5: they use to compute metrics on package sets
  • metainformation we might share with others:
    • additional tags about configuration/compilation option might be used in WP3 to introduce metainfo on incompatibilities detected by the QA/Testing phases, and might be shared using the MetaDataServer approach.

11h45 : description and demo of the existing tools

• ceve
• check
• edoslib
• metadataserver
• solver

Afternoon Session:

14h30 : overview of the work left for T+18 (April 6th)

• Submission to FRCSS06
• deliverables
• automated source tracking
• improved dependency analysis
• statistics
• toolchain engineering
• coordination with the other workpackages
• LICENCING ISSUES

16h00 : scheduling of the work, definition of task leaders

17h30 : concluding remarks

18h00: meeting end