Toward a distributed package management system

Fabien Dagnat (1) , Gwendal Simon (1) , Xu Zhang (1)

1 INFO - Département informatique

The mutation of the software economy toward crowdsourcing, the explosion of the number of devices and the increasing need for quickly-released software call for revisiting the way software are deployed and managed. The current approach adopted by most software package management systems is to rely on a single distributor, who collects packages from upstream sources, tests, releases and distributes them through a centralized channel, called repository. In this paper, we identify the major downsides of this centralized architecture and promotes a distributed approach for software deployment. That is, in a network consisting of interconnected symmetric peers, all the developers are allowed to release and distribute software asynchronously. The discovery and retrieval of software is achieved by the coordination among peers. We highlight the impacts of using such an approach and define a specific format of metadata that supports distributed package release.

Mots clés: Packet management; Peer to peer networks

Domaines: Ordinateur et société [cs.CY]; Système d'exploitation [cs.OS]

Fabien Dagnat, Gwendal Simon, Xu Zhang. Toward a distributed package management system. Lococo 2011: workshop on logics for component configuration, Sep 2011, Perugia, Italy. ⟨hal-00623548⟩