Manccosi Deliverable D5.2: Extension of an existing package manager to produce traces of ugradeability problems in CUDF format

One of the objectives of the Mancoosi project is to resolve some of the problems that users of Free and Open Source Software distributions experience when trying to install, remove, or upgrade packages installed on their machines. The specific goal of Workpackage 5 is to to build a data base of problem reports generated from such user requests to a meta-installer, which then will be used by the Mancoosi project, and the research community in general, to develop better algorithms to compute upgrade paths. The design of the languages used to produce these error reports have been described in an earlier deliverable. The format of the report produced on a user machine is specific to the software distribution used, but follows a general project-wide scheme called DUDF (Distribution Upgradeability Description Format). Problem reports are uploaded to a server specific to the software distribution and translated by the distribution editor into a common format called CUDF. The Common Upgradeability Description Format (CUDF) is a format for describing upgrade problems independently of a specific FOSS distribution. Reports in CUDF format are then transferred from the distribution editor's server to a central server of the Mancoosi project, where they will be used in the construction of a project-wide problem database. This document summarizes the work done by three different GNU/Linux distributions Debian, Mandriva and Caixa Magica to generate problem reports on user machines in DUDF, transfer them to the distribution editors, and to convert them there into the common format CUDF.