The management of third-party package dependencies is crucial to most technology stacks, with package managers acting as brokers to ensure that a verified package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of package ecosystems with their own management features. While recent studies have shown that developers struggle to migrate their dependencies, the common assumption is that package ecosystems are used without any issue. In this study, we explore 13 package ecosystems to understand whether their features correlate with the experience of their users. By studying experience through the questions that developers ask on the question-and-answer site Stack Overflow, we find that developer questions are grouped into three themes (i.e., Package management, Input-Output, and Package Usage). Our preliminary analysis indicates that specific features are correlated with the user experience. Our work lays out future directions to investigate the trade-offs involved in designing the ideal package ecosystem.
翻译:管理第三方软件包依赖性对大多数技术堆叠至关重要,由软件包管理员充当经纪人,以确保正确安装、配置或从应用程序中删除经核实的软件包。技术堆叠的多样性导致数十个具有自身管理特点的软件包生态系统。虽然最近的研究表明开发者努力迁移其依赖性,但共同的假设是,软件包生态系统的使用没有任何问题。在本研究中,我们探索了13个软件包生态系统,以了解其特征是否与其用户的经验相关。通过研究开发者就问答点堆积流提出的问题的经验,我们发现开发者的问题分为三个主题(即软件包管理、输入-产出和软件包使用)。我们的初步分析表明,具体特征与用户的经验相关。我们的工作为调查设计理想软件包生态系统所涉及的权衡问题确定了未来方向。