MPM: a modular package manager

Software distributions in the FOSS world rely on so-called package managers for the installation and removal of packages on target machines. State-of-the-art package managers are monolithic in architecture, and each of them is hard-wired to an ad-hoc dependency solver implementing a customized heuristics. In this paper we propose a modular architecture allowing for pluggable dependency solvers and backends. We argue that this is the path that leads to the next generation of package managers that will deliver better results, accept more expressive input languages, and can be easily adaptable to new platforms. We present a working prototype---called MPM---which has been implemented following the design advocated in this paper.