The paper Bootstrapping Software Distributions , co-authored with Johannes Schauer has been accepted for publication in the proceedings of CBSE 2013, Vancouver, Canada, June 17-21, 2013.

New hardware architectures and custom co-processor extensions are introduced to the market on a regular basis. While it is relatively easy to port a proprietary software stack to a new platform, FOSS distributions face major challenges.

On year ago, we (the mancoosi team) published a comparison study regarding the state of the art of dependency solving in debian. As few noticed, the data presented had few glitches that I promised to fix. So we've repeated our tests using exactly the same data we used one year ago, but now using the latest available versions of all package managers as available in debian unstable.

Last year we invited David to work with us for a few days to add a generic interface to apt to call external solvers.

A small (and probably not complete) list of videos associated to the mancoosi project @ FOSDEM.

• QA tools for FOSS distributions (FOSDEM 2012) - Pietro Abate (video)

• Mancoosi tools for the analysis and quality assurance of FOSS (FOSDEM 2011) - Ralf Treinen (video)

• Improving Rollback in Linux via DSL approach & distributing (FOSDEM 2011) - John Thomson (video)

• Cross distro dependency

Recently I've discovered a subtle consequence of how the order in which dependencies are specified in debian actually matters. While re-factoring the code of dose3, I changed the order in which dependencies are considered by our sat solver (of edos-fame) . I witnessed a twofold performance loss just by randomizing how variables were presented to our sat solver.

The results of the MISC competition 2011 were announced during the Workshop LoCoCo in Perugia Monday 12th of September.

The winners are :

• for the track paranoid and trendy the solver aspuncud, a solver based on an experimental version of clasp with iterative unsatisfiable core elimination by Oliver Matheis.
• and for the track user the solver gj-user-solver, a refacto

Recently, all relevant packages needed to run mpm (the mancoosi package manager) landed in debian (thanks ralf and zack !). Now it should be a tad easier to run mpm and to play with it. The code of mpm is available on the mancoosi svn repository (user/pass : mancoosi/mancoosi) . To run it, you also need to install python-apt.

These are all cudf solvers you can use as mpm backends.

Thanks to Ralf's work, dose3 has been just accepted in debian experimental !!!