Characterizing Common and Domain-Specific Package Bugs: A Case Study on Ubuntu

Ubuntu is an open source software platform that runs everywhere from the smartphone, the tablet and the PC to the server and the cloud. In Ubuntu, there are many self-contained or third-party software packages for different use, and a bug report in Ubuntu could affect one or more packages simultaneously. Identifying the common package bugs in Ubuntu can help both developers and users better understand the packages they are developing or using, and also provide further guidelines to developers of similar packages in the future. In this paper, we perform a large-scale empirical study of common package bugs on Ubuntu by leveraging topic modeling. By analyzing a total of 240,097 bug reports, we identify 3 general bugs that are common to all Ubuntu packages, i.e., Graphical User Interface (GUI), Maintenance, and Runtime bugs. Moreover, we categorize top-100 packages with most number of bug reports into 6 categories (i.e., graphics, internet, office, sound and video, system management, and kernel), and identify domain-specific bugs for each category.