[Discussioni] EDOS

[Francesco Potorti`]

 <http://www.edos-project.org/>

Sixth Framework Programme - Priority 2

Information Society Technologies


EDOS: Environment for the Distribution of Open Source software

The Open Source and Free Software movement now touches a very large and
growing community of users. The GNU/Linux operating system for instance
has an estimated 18 million users worldwide. The number of contributing
developers canvary between several hundred and several thousand. Open
Source and Free Software has a critical mass of developers to choose
from.

This has helped to ensure high quality for open source software, and has
given end-users a real alternative to usingproprietary software. The
Open Source community will continue to grow over the coming years.

However, despite this success, there are important problems in the
production of Open Source operating systems on a large scale that will
become even more significant as the number of users grows.

  The goals

Open source distribution editors package and assemble a large number of
programs and applications into a single tested distribution, together
with a set of tools to install and administer the system.

Two key functions performed by distribution editors are:

  * Producing a new version of a distribution: starting from a complete
    version of the distribution, the editor adds, deletes, reconfigure,
    and updates packages with respect to the external sources, etc.
  * Customizing a distribution for a specific user: this includes
    adding, deleting, updating and configuring packages.

The main objective of this project is to develop technology and tools to
support and improve these two processes.

  The challenges

To pursue our goals, we will use formal methods, coming from the
academic research groups in the project, to addressin a novel way three
outstanding problems:

  * dependency management among large, heterogeneous collections of
    software packages
  * testing and QA for large, complex software systems
  * the efficient distribution of large software systems, using
    peer-to-peer and distributed data-base technology