一句话：提出利用 npm 依赖迁移模式自动识别需替换的衰退包并推荐替代包的方法，准确率达96%。
软件生态中的包会因新包涌现而重要性衰退，复用减少、维护频率下降，开发者需将依赖迁移到更优替代包，但识别待替换包、寻找替代品并评估迁移收益十分耗时。本文提出一种自动方法，利用生态系统中已有的依赖迁移模式，识别需要替换的包并推荐替代方案，同时给出开源项目实际执行此类迁移的真实示例。作者在 npm 生态上评估该方法，发现 96% 的建议替代方案是准确的；对 JavaScript 专家开发者的调查还显示，67% 的受访者表示会在未来项目中使用所推荐的替代包。
Software ecosystems (e.g., npm, PyPI) are the backbone of modern software developments. Developers add new packages to ecosystems every day to solve new problems or provide alternative solutions, causing obsolete packages to decline in their importance to the community. Packages in decline are reused less over time and may become less frequently maintained. Thus, developers usually migrate their dependencies to better alternatives. Replacing packages in decline with better alternatives requires time and effort by developers to identify packages that need to be replaced, find the alternatives, asset migration benefits, and finally, perform the migration. This paper proposes an approach that automatically identifies packages that need to be replaced and finds their alternatives supported with real-world examples of open source projects performing the suggested migrations. At its core, our approach relies on the dependency migration patterns performed in the ecosystem to suggest migrations to other developers. We evaluated our approach on the npm ecosystem and found that 96% of the suggested alternatives are accurate. Furthermore, by surveying expert JavaScript developers, 67% of them indicate that they will use our suggested alternative packages in their future projects.
DOI 原文 · arXiv · PDF（开放获取） · DBLP
@inproceedings{MujahidCAS23,
title = {Where to Go Now? Finding Alternatives for Declining Packages in the npm Ecosystem},
author = {Suhaib Mujahid and Diego Elias Costa and Rabe Abdalkareem and Emad Shihab},
booktitle = {ASE},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1109/ase56229.2023.00119}
}