Paper Artifacts

Abstract—Context: Modern open-source operating systems consist of numerous independent packages crafted by countless developers worldwide. To effectively manage this diverse array of software originating from various entities, Linux distributions have devised package management tools to streamline the pro- cess. Despite offering convenience in software installation, systems like Ubuntu’s apt may obscure the health of the upstream source. Objective: Employing the libyears software metric established by the CHOASS project, we aim to assess the holistic health of one of the leading Linux distributions at the package level and in its upstream source. Simplifying and making metrics easily applicable is a pivotal goal in the software engineering community. Here, we demonstrate the application of the libyears metric to a heterogeneous package management system. Method: We classified the package version data, then applied the libyears method in a two-pronged approach. First, we derived a novel approach to derive the libyears from the version number itself, and then we calculated the libyears using the upstream date of the source of the package date. Results: Our approach to calculating the libyears directly from the version number as well as our work to classify the different types of version numbering schemes shows that it can help indicate the freshness of a project. However, the extensive manual effort required to produce a libyears value, for even a minimal subset of core packages, limits its usefulness as a metric for evaluating overall distribution health. This result led directly to the development of Package Version Activity Classifier (PVAC), a novel method for systematically assessing the staleness of packages across multiple distribution releases. Conclusions: We present a novel way to systematically evaluate the health of projects with heterogeneous package management systems, such as Ubuntu, by examining staleness of its packages. The PVAC method we propose examines extends previous work by the software engineering research community by identifying packages with little to no development activity in the version of packages included within a distribution release.