The Ultimate Debian Database: Consolidating bazaar metadata for Quality Assurance and data mining

Abstract

Abstract-FLOSS distributions like RedHat and Ubuntu require a lot more complex infrastructures than most other FLOSS projects. In the case of community-driven distributions like Debian, the development of such an infrastructure is often not very organized, leading to new data sources being added in an impromptu manner while hackers set up new services that gain acceptance in the community. Mixing and matching data is then harder than should be, albeit being badly needed for Quality Assurance and data mining. Massive refactoring and integration is not a viable solution either, due to the constraints imposed by the bazaar development model.

Replicating mining studies with SOFAS

“…The extracted data focuses on more high-level development information and dynamics and is offered "as is" (no actual analysis is performed). The Ultimate Debian Database [27] follows a similar approach but only for the Debian Linux distribution and all its binary packages. However, it focuses on extracting and presenting more system specific information (package popularity, history of packages upload, etc.).…”

“…But these efforts are mainly aimed at creating large, internet accessible, evolution analysis data repositories, similarly to PROMISE [8]. Some of them offer a query-able, static collection of data for specific projects fetched from single [26] or multiple sources [2], [27]; others allow the user to interactively run specific analyses on her own projects of interest [15], [16] through online web applications. Large, static software data repositories give third party applications and analyses a sizeable, common body of knowledge to build upon.…”

A prolog-based framework for search, integration and empirical analysis on software evolution data

“…Nussbaum et al [8] presented the Ultimate Debian Database that integrates information about the Debian project from various sources to answer user queries related to bugs and source code using a SQL-based framework. However, their framework does not have support for queries that require negation or transitive closure.…”

AppRecommender: um recomendador de aplicativos GNU/Linux

“…Diante da complexa e crescente estrutura do projeto, observa-se um esforço por parte dos desenvolvedores, principalmente da equipe responsável pelo controle de qualidade 12 , de reunir, organizar e disponibilizar as informações ou meta-dados concernentes a esta estrutura [Nussbaum and Zacchiroli 2010]. Algumas destas iniciativas que serviram como fontes de dados para o AppRecommender são detalhadas a seguir.…”

“…O UDD 23é uma iniciativa recente do time de qualidade criada com o intuito de reunir informações de diversos aspectos do Debian numa base de dadosúnica [Nussbaum and Zacchiroli 2010].…”