Search heuristics and optimisations to solve package installability problems by constraint programming

The aim of this work is to present a constraint programming formulation of the package installability problem. The package installability problem deals about determining whether a package of a repository could be installed or not. This problem is known to be NP-complete.Efficient search heuristics will be presented, leading to few failures. Our solver is able to determine whether all packages of the Debian distribution can be installed in less than 6 minutes. At the end, implementation of optimisation criteria are also presented.