OSNews

"We have developed a new package-management tool, called Opium, that improves on current tools in two ways: Opium is complete, in that if there is a solution, Opium is guaranteed to find it, and Opium can optimize a user-provided objective function, which could for example state that smaller packages should be preferred over larger ones. We performed a comparative study of our tool against Debian's apt-get on 600 traces of real-world package installations. We show that Opium runs fast enough to be usable, and that its completeness and optimality guarantees provide concrete benefits to end users."