Formal Aspects of Free and Open Source Software Components - A Short Survey.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) distributions are popular solutions to deploy and maintain software on server, desktop, and mobile computing equipment. The typical deployment method in the FOSS setting relies on software distributions as vendors, packages as independently deployable components, and package managers as upgrade tools. We review research results from the past decade that apply formal methods to the study of inter-component relationships in the FOSS context. We discuss how those results are being used to attack both issues faced by users, such as dealing with upgrade failures on target machines, and issues important to distributions such as quality assurance processes for repositories containing tens of thousands, rapidly evolving software