A Proposal of an Installation Manual Generation Method for Open Source Software Using Operation Logs

Abstract

An open source software (OSS) is the software whose source code has been public, usually through the Internet, so that everybody can use and modify it freely. A lot of companies, governments, and universities are now using OSS technologies because of the advantages they bring. However, the use of an OSS is actually hard for its beginners, because many OSSes have few good manuals, where they have usually been developed by volunteers. Besides, the installation of an OSS package sometimes requires installations of multiple OSS packages to be integrated together. In this paper, we propose a method of automatically generating an installation manual of an OSS package, including the one requiring the integration of multiple OSS packages. Then, we implement the proposed method for evaluations. Our experimental results in installations of OSS packages including the one requiring the integration of four packages by generated manuals verify the effectiveness of our method.