Abstract
Open-source software has become a powerful engine for the development of the software industry. Its production mode, which is based on large-scale group collaboration, allows for the rapid and continuous evolution of open-source software on demand. As an important branch of open-source software, open-source operating systems are commonly used in modern service industries such as finance, logistics, education, medical care, e-commerce and tourism, etc. The reliability of these systems is increasingly valued. However, a self-organizing and loosely coupled development approach complicates the structural analysis of open-source operating system software. Traditional methods focus on analysis at the local level. There is a lack of research on the relationship between internal attributes and external overall characteristics. Consequently, conventional methods are difficult to adapt to complex software systems, especially the structural analysis of open-source operating system software. It is therefore of great significance to capture the holistic structure and behavior of the software system. Complex network theory, which is adequate for this task, can make up for the deficiency of traditional software structure evaluation methods that focus only on local structure. In this paper, we propose a package network model, which is a directed graph structure, to describe the dependency of open-source operating system software packages. Based on the Ubuntu Kylin Linux Operating system, we construct a software package dependency network of each distributed version and analyze the structural evolution through the dimensions of scale, density, connectivity, cohesion, and heterogeneity of each network.
Highlights
With the extensive application of software in daily production and life, complexity increases dramatically
Exploring the internal rules of complex software systems and figuring out key nodes that lead to vital problems will play an important part in the software development progress [1,2,3]
This paper proposes a betweenness-based method in order to exploit the key nodes of an open-source operating system software package dependency network
Summary
With the extensive application of software in daily production and life, complexity increases dramatically. Open-source platforms emphasize software reuse, which is not restricted to internal projects [24,25,26,27,28] This reusing causes the dependencies between applications, and between applications and operating systems, to become more complex. The system involves the stacking of software packages, and the orderly combination of these packages It is worth exploring further so as to describe and study the internal structure of open-source operating systems. This paper makes three main contributions: It constructs a software package dependency network for an open-source operating system, which sets the overall structure of the system. This paper proposes a betweenness-based method in order to exploit the key nodes of an open-source operating system software package dependency network.
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