ModuleGuard: Understanding and Detecting Module Conflicts in Python Ecosystem
Python has become one of the most popular programming languages for software development due to its simplicity, readability, and versatility. As the Python ecosystem grows, developers face increasing challenges in avoiding module conflicts, which occur when different packages have the same namespace modules. Unfortunately, existing work has neither investigated the module conflict comprehensively nor provided tools to detect the conflict. Therefore, this paper systematically investigates the module conflict problem and its impact on the Python ecosystem. We propose a novel technique called InstSimulator, which leverages semantics and installation simulation to achieve accurate and efficient module extraction. Based on this, we implement a tool called ModuleGuard to detect module conflicts for the Python ecosystem.
For the study, we first collect 97 MC issues on GitHub, classify the characteristics and causes of these MC issues, summarize three different conflict patterns, and analyze their potential threats. Then we conduct a large-scale analysis of the whole PyPI ecosystem (4.2 million packages) and GitHub popular projects (3,711 projects) to detect each MC pattern and analyze their potential impact. We discover that module conflicts still impact numerous open-source software packages in PyPI. Our work reveals Python’s shortcomings in handling naming conflicts and provides a tool and guidelines for developers to detect conflicts.
Fri 19 AprDisplayed time zone: Lisbon change
14:00 - 15:30 | Analytics 5Research Track / Journal-first Papers at Amália Rodrigues Chair(s): Sridhar Chimalakonda Indian Institute of Technology, Tirupati | ||
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