An Empirical Study of Package Management Issues via Stack Overflow

Abstract

The package manager (PM) is crucial to most technology stacks, acting as a broker to ensure that a verified dependency package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of PMs with various features. While our recent study indicates that package management features of PM are related to end-user experiences, it is unclear what those issues are and what information is required to resolve them. In this paper, we have investigated PM issues faced by end-users through an empirical study of content on Stack Overflow (SO). We carried out a qualitative analysis of 1,131 questions and their accepted answer posts for three popular PMs (i.e., Maven, npm, and NuGet ) to identify issue types, underlying causes, and their resolutions. Our results confirm that end-users struggle with PM tool usage (approximately 64-72%). We observe that most issues are raised by end-users due to lack of instructions and errors messages from PM tools. In terms of issue resolution, we find that external link sharing is the most common practice to resolve PM issues. Additionally, we observe that links pointing to useful resources (i.e., official documentation websites, tutorials, etc.) are most frequently shared, indicating the potential for tool support and the ability to provide relevant information for PM end-users.

An Empirical Study of npm Ecosystem Related Tweets by Core Software Developers: A Case Study

“…As a whole, tweets belonging to the package management category, including topics such as usage scenarios, configurations, feature information, bug reports, software comparisons, and dependencies, were most prevalent (i.e., 58%). This finding is consistent with our previous studies on software ecosystem issues 13,14 . The findings indicate that developers are using Twitter to filter and curate information about package management activities associated with the npm ecosystem.…”

“…These prior studies show that Twitter posts are useful to understand software developers' challenges. In our previous empirical studies, we looked at the software packaging ecosystem-related discussions by developers on question-and-answering sites and found that package management issues are the biggest challenge [13][14][15] . However, no study has been conducted so far to examine the tweets shared by developers to reveal the challenges associated with using the software packaging ecosystem and how they differ from question-and-answer sites.…”

“…Step-2: Extracting core developers Tweets-To extract npm core developers Tweets using output of step-1, we utilized official Twitter search API. Afterwards, to filter npm ecosystem-related Tweets we limit our data collection process to tweets that only correspond to specific keywords such as npm, pnpm, npm-install, npm-scripts, npmignore, npm-shrinkwrap obtained from our previous work 14 . The output of this step is 39,425 tweets dataset (D1) related to npm ecosystem by core developers.…”

“…In order to discover the topics from tweets posted by the npm core developers, an open coding strategy was adopted similar to previous studies 14,21,27,28 . The open coding process consists of three steps.…”

“…Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms among developers to stay informed about fast-paced developments in the development landscape, to learn from others, and to build relationships 11,12 . In a series of empirical studies, we looked at the software packaging ecosystemrelated discussions by developers on question-and-answering sites and found that package management issues are the biggest challenge [13][14][15] . However, no study has been conducted that examines the tweets shared by developers to determine the challenges that developers face, including the topic of discussion, nature and sentiments associated with using software packaging ecosystems, as well as how they differ from question-and-answer sites.…”