Taxonomy of Package Management in Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Abstract

Package management is instrumental for programming languages and operating systems, and yet it is neglected by both areas as an implementation detail. For this reason, it lacks the same kind of conceptual organization: we lack terminology to classify them or to reason about their design trade-offs. In this paper, we share our experience in both OS and language-specific package manager development, categorizing families of package managers and discussing their design implications beyond particular implementations. We also identify possibilities in the still largely unexplored area of package manager interoperability.

Authors

Hisham Muhammad, Lucas C. Villa Real, Michael Homer

Published in

Workshop on Programming Languages and Operating Systems (PLOS), 2019

The final copy of this publication is available from the publisher.

Resources

PDF
mwh.nz/pdf/plos2019
this page
mwh.nz/pubs/plos2019
Michael Homer — 2023 d38f60fb