Boolean-Based Dependency Management for the Eclipse Ecosystem

Abstract

In June 2008, the Eclipse open platform released a new dependency management system called p2. That system was based on the translation of the dependency management problem into a pseudo-Boolean optimization problem, to be handled by the Sat4j solver. Since then, p2 has been more tightly integrated with Sat4j, the platform opened a public plugin repository (the Eclipse marketplace) which relies on p2 to install the available plugins and their dependencies, and became the favorite way to install plugins in the Eclipse community. This paper summarizes the issues raised by Eclipse dependency management, its pseudo-Boolean encoding within p2, its extension for Linux package management with p2cudf, and concludes with lessons learned on using research software in production systems.