Package equivalence in complex software network
This work addresses the need for package categorization in large software networks like npm, which is incremental as it applies existing graph methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of finding similar packages in the npm software dependency network using graph structure methods, resulting in a categorization approach useful for recommendation systems based on analysis of 216,911 packages.
The public package registry npm is one of the biggest software registry. With its 216 911 software packages, it forms a big network of software dependencies. In this paper we evaluate various methods for finding similar packages in the npm network, using only the structure of the graph. Namely, we want to find a way of categorizing similar packages, which would be useful for recommendation systems. This size enables us to compute meaningful results, as it softened the particularities of the graph. Npm is also quite famous as it is the default package repository of Node.js. We believe that it will make our results interesting for more people than a less used package repository. This makes it a good subject of analysis of software networks.