EDOS - Environment for the development and Distribution of Open Source software

The EDOS project aims to study and solve problems associated with the production, management and distribution of open source software packages.

Software packages are files in the RPM or Debian packaging format that contain executable programs or libraries, their files, along with metadata describing what's in the package and what conditions are needed to use it.

EDOS uses formal methods coming from the academic research groups in the project, to address in a novel way three outstanding problems that are associated with software packages:

* dependency management among large, heterogeneous collections of software packages,
* testing and QA for large, complex software systems,
* and the efficient distribution of large software systems, using peer-to-peer and distributed data-base technology.

EDOS has studied these problems and produced various technical reports explaining their importance and giving ways of mathematically expressing them, algorithms for solving associated problems and real-world statistics.

EDOS is also producing a certain amount of software which is, of course, free and open source to help distribution of software packages.