Gentoo Package Dependencies over Time

Open source distributions such as Gentoo need to accurately track dependency relations between software packages in order to install working systems. To do this, Gentoo has a carefully authored database containing those relations. In this paper, we extract the Gentoo package dependency graph and its changes over time. The final dependency graph spans 15 thousand open source projects and 80 thousand dependency relations. Furthermore, the development of this graph is tracked over time from the beginning of the Gentoo project in 2000 to the first quarter of 2012, with monthly resolution. The resulting dataset provides many opportunities for research. In this paper we explore cluster analysis to reveals meaningful relations between packages and in a separate paper we analyze changes in the dependencies over time to get insights in the innovation dynamics of open source software.