A graph method of package dependency analysis on Linux Operating system

Maintaining package-based Linux operating system distributions and addressing their evolution have always been a challenge. Since all packages that form a distribution of Linux Operating system interact with each other, it leads to complicated dependency relationships of each distribution. Current package managers only provide a local view of the dependency relationship. It is still a lack for distribution releasers to obtain a global view of the package dependency relationships. In this paper we present our research that target to bridge this gap: we propose a graph method to establish entire distribution package dependency relationship and analyze the complicated relationship graph with relevant properties. We implement our method on ubuntu kylin 14.04. The experiments illustrate that our graph approach is efficient for understanding of the whole distribution and could assist a high-quality maintenance and effective evolution.