On SAT Technologies for Dependency Management and Beyond

SAT solvers technology is now mature enough to be part of the engineer toolbox side by side with Mixed Integer Programming and Constraint Programming tools. As of June 2008, two great pieces of software are using SAT technology to manage dependency like problems: the open source Linux distribution OpenSuse 11.0, released on June 19, 2008, integrates a custom SAT solver in their dependency manager Zypp. The new update manager of Eclipse 3.4, called Equinox p2, also uses SAT technology to resolve dependencies in their OSGi platform. The use of SAT technology in Software Product Lines has already been pointed out by several authors. We believe that the current interest for solving dependency management problems in SAT technologies opens quite interesting challenges to the SAT community. First, since those problems are met in software with interactive use, SAT engines need to solve them within seconds. Second, providing one solution is usually not sufficient: finding the best solution is usually what users want. Finally, fully supported open source or commercial SAT engines are needed for a broader adoption in the software engineering community.