Linux Distribution Testing and Quality Assurance: Current Developments of the EDOS Project and Open Questions

Overview

This paper describes the developments done within the EDOS project regarding Linux distribution testing and quality assurance process. It will also point out remaining open questions that could be subjects for further research and which could bring significant advances for Linux distribution developers. As the number of testing units (the distribution packages) is usually large (more than 10,000 packages for most of the distributions), the complexity of the testing task is huge and leads to either reduce system quality by accepting non-tested packages or delay final releases and increase overall system development cost.