HERO: On the Chaos When PATH Meets Modules

Wang, Ying1; Qiao, Liang1; Xu, Chang2,3; Liu, Yepang4; Cheung, Shing-Chi5; Meng, Na6; Yu, Hai1; Zhu, Zhiliang1

10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00022

2021

43rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering - Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP) / 43rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER)

0270-5257

978-1-6654-0296-5

2021 IEEE/ACM 43RD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (ICSE 2021)

99-111

MAY 25-28, 2021

null,null,ELECTR NETWORK

10662 LOS VAQUEROS CIRCLE, PO BOX 3014, LOS ALAMITOS, CA 90720-1264 USA

IEEE COMPUTER SOC

Ever since its first release in 2009, the Go programming language (Golang) has been well received by software communities. A major reason for its success is the powerful support of library-based development, where a Golang project can be conveniently built on top of other projects by referencing them as libraries. As Golang evolves, it recommends the use of a new library-referencing mode to overcome the limitations of the original one. While these two library modes are incompatible, both are supported by the Golang ecosystem. The heterogeneous use of library-referencing modes across Golang projects has caused numerous dependency management (DM) issues, incurring reference inconsistencies and even build failures. Motivated by the problem, we conducted an empirical study to characterize the DM issues, understand their root causes, and examine their fixing solutions. Based on our findings, we developed HERO, an automated technique to detect DM issues and suggest proper fixing solutions. We applied HERO to 19,000 popular Golang projects. The results showed that HERO achieved a high detection rate of 98.5% on a DM issue benchmark and found 2,422 new DM issues in 2,356 popular Golang projects. We reported 280 issues, among which 181 (64.6%) issues have been confirmed, and 160 of them (88.4%) have been fixed or are under fixing. Almost all the fixes have adopted our fixing suggestions.

Golang Ecosystem Dependency Management

其他

英语

CPCI-S ; EI

National Natural Science Foundation of China[61932021,61902056,61802164,61977014]

Computer Science

Computer Science, Software Engineering ; Computer Science, Theory & Methods

WOS:000684601800009

20213910949865

Ecology and Ecosystems:454.3

Web of Science

1.Northeastern Univ, Software Coll, Shenyang, Peoples R China
2.Nanjing Univ, State Key Lab Novel Software Technol, Nanjing, Peoples R China
3.Nanjing Univ, Dept Comp Sci & Technol, Nanjing, Peoples R China
4.Southern Univ Sci & Technol, Shenzhen, Peoples R China
5.Hong Kong Univ Sci & Technol, Hong Kong, Peoples R China
6.Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA USA

Wang, Ying,Qiao, Liang,Xu, Chang,et al. HERO: On the Chaos When PATH Meets Modules[C]. 10662 LOS VAQUEROS CIRCLE, PO BOX 3014, LOS ALAMITOS, CA 90720-1264 USA:IEEE COMPUTER SOC,2021:99-111.