Update Propagation Practices in Highly Reusable Open Source Components

Abstract

Abstract. In today's business and software arena, more and more companies are adopting open source software. An example of this rising phenomenon is to base software products on highly reusable open source components. In this scenario, the evolution of the software product is coupled with the evolution of the open source component. A common assumption is that component updates are immediately and regularly propagated to the project. This paper investigates this assumption empirically by studying update propagation practices in two popular open source libraries, zlib and FFmpeg. For each library, we analyze various repository sources with information such as bug reports, revision history, and source code. The results of the case studies suggest that update propagation is subject to several technical and non-technical factors including the way the open source library is used, the extent to which updates are documented, and the degree of community involvement. Based on these findings, we propose a set of recommendations that would allow better follow-up of updates and smoother update propagation.

Exploring Socio-Technical Dependencies in Open Source Software Projects

“…Inter-project studies are mostly exploring relationships and dependencies among related projects, for instance studying update propagation patterns among different OSS projects [27].…”

Trust issues in open source software development

“…The greatest threat to the validatity of this work is selection bias. Unfortunately, the kind of fine grain analysis in Section 2 (given in more detail in [4]) is difficult to carry out on a large scale. Our tonic is to stress the context of our results and to be careful when we generalize.…”

“…In this paper, we consider two aspects of this issue. First, we look at update propagation (i.e., how bug fixes and other changes move from project to project); Section 2 describes previously published research [4] that investigates update practices for two reusable components. Second, Section 3 discusses ongoing work to extract information about underlying social networks from open source project repositories, specifically from distributed version control systems.…”

Successful Reuse of Software Components: A Report from the Open Source Perspective

“…4. Finally, the static-linking reuse of the FFMpeg components presents two opposite scenarios: either a black-box reuse strategy, with "update propagation" issues reported when the latest version of a project has to be compiled against a particular version of the FFMpeg components [29]; or the whitebox reuse strategy, with copies of the components being deployed in the repositories of other projects which are managed independently from the their original development branch.…”