A First Look at Package-to-Group Mechanism: An Empirical Study of the Linux Distributions

Reusing third-party software packages is a common practice in software development. As the scale and complexity of open-source software (OSS) projects continue to grow (e.g., Linux distributions), the number of reused third-party packages has significantly increased. Therefore, maintaining effective package management is critical for developing and evolving OSS projects. To achieve this, a package-to-group mechanism (P2G) is employed to enable unified installation, uninstallation, and updates of multiple packages at once. To better understand this mechanism, this paper takes Linux distributions as a case study and presents an empirical study focusing on its application trends, evolutionary patterns, group quality, and developer tendencies. By analyzing 11,746 groups and 193,548 packages from 89 versions of 5 popular Linux distributions and conducting questionnaire surveys with Linux practitioners and researchers, we derive several key insights. Our findings show that P2G is increasingly being adopted, particularly in popular Linux distributions. P2G follows six evolutionary patterns (\eg splitting and merging groups). Interestingly, packages no longer managed through P2G are more likely to remain in Linux distributions rather than being directly removed. To assess the effectiveness of P2G, we propose a metric called {\sc GValue} to evaluate the quality of groups and identify issues such as inadequate group descriptions and insufficient group sizes. We also summarize five types of packages that tend to adopt P2G, including graphical desktops, networks, etc. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study focusing on the P2G mechanisms. We expect our study can assist in the efficient management of packages and reduce the burden on practitioners in rapidly growing Linux distributions and other open-source software projects.