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, effective package management is essential for the development and evolution of the OSS project. To achieve this, a package-to-group mechanism (P2G) is used to enable the unified installation, uninstallation, and updates of multiple packages at once. To better understand the mechanism, this paper takes Linux distributions as a case study and presents an empirical study focusing on its application trends, evolution patterns, group quality, and group tendency. 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 (e.g., splitting and merging groups). Interestingly, packages no longer managed through P2G are more likely to remain in Linux distributions rather than being directly removed. In addition, we propose a metric called 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 and networks. To our knowledge, this is the first study to focus on P2G mechanisms. We hope that our study can assist in the efficient management of packages and reduce the burden on practitioners in the rapidly growing Linux distributions and other open-source software projects.