An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues via Stack Overflow

The package manager (PM) is crucial to most technology stacks, acting as a broker to ensure that a verified dependency package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of PMs with various features. While our recent study indicates that package management features of PM are related to end-user experiences, it is unclear what those issues are and what information is required to resolve them. In this paper, we have investigated PM issues faced by end-users through an empirical study of content on Stack Overflow (SO). We carried out a qualitative analysis of 1,131 questions and their accepted answer posts for three popular PMs (i.e., Maven, npm, and NuGet ) to identify issue types, underlying causes, and their resolutions. Our results confirmed that end-users struggle with PM tool usage (approximately 64-72%). We observed that most issues are raised by end-users due to a lack of instructions and errors messages from PM tools. In terms of issue resolution, we observed that external link sharing is the most common practice to resolve PM issues. Additionally, we found that links pointing to useful resources (i.e., official documentation websites, tutorials, etc.) are the most frequently shared, indicating the potential for tool support and the ability to provide relevant information.包管理器（Package Manager，PM）对绝大多数技术栈而言至关重要，其作为中介角色，可确保经过验证的依赖包在应用中被正确安装、配置或移除。技术栈的多样性催生了数十种功能各异的包管理器。尽管我们近期的研究表明，包管理器的包管理功能与终端用户体验紧密相关，但目前仍不清楚此类问题的具体类型，以及解决这些问题所需的信息内容。本文通过对问答平台Stack Overflow（以下简称SO）上的内容开展实证研究，针对终端用户面临的包管理器相关问题进行了调研。我们针对三款主流包管理器（即Maven、npm与NuGet）的1131条问题及其已采纳回答帖文开展定性分析，以识别问题类型、根本成因及对应解决方案。研究结果证实，约64%至72%的终端用户在包管理器工具的使用上存在困难。我们发现，多数终端用户提出的问题源于包管理器工具缺乏操作指引与错误提示信息。在问题解决层面，共享外部链接是解决包管理器相关问题的最常见手段。此外，我们发现指向实用资源（如官方文档网站、教程等）的链接是最常被分享的内容，这表明开发针对性工具支持、提供精准相关信息具备现实潜力。