Platform Migrator

Munir Contractor (1) , Christophe Pradal (2, 3) , Dennis Shasha (4)

1 NYU - New York University [New York]
2 Cirad - Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement
3 ZENITH - Scientific Data Management
4 CIMS - Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences [New York]

Currently, one of the major problems in software development and maintenance, specially in academia, is managing packages across time and systems. An application developed under a particular package manager using a certain set of packages does not always work reliably when ported to a different system or when abandoned for a period of time and picked up again with newer versions of the packages. In this report, we provide and describe Platform Migrator, a software that makes it easy to test applications across systems by identifying various packages in the base system, figuring out their corresponding equivalents in the new system and testing whether the software works as expected on the new system. Platform migrator can migrate software written and set up inside a conda environment to any Linux based system with conda or some other package manager. The philosophy of platform migrator is to identify a closure of the required dependencies for the software being migrated using the conda environment metadata and then use that closure to install the various dependencies on the target system. This documentation provides comprehensive details on how to use platform migrator and what it does internally to migrate software from one system to another. It also contains tutorials and case studies that can be replicated for better understanding of the process.

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Munir Contractor, Christophe Pradal, Dennis Shasha. Platform Migrator. [Technical Report] TR2018-990, New York University. 2018, pp.43. ⟨hal-01948552⟩