Towards a versioning model for component-based software assembly

The world of software development has rapidly changed in the last few years due to the adoption of component-based technologies. The classical software configuration management, which deals with source code versioning, becomes insufficient in the world where most components are distributed in a binary form. This paper focuses on solving versioning issues in the SOFA/DCUP (software appliances/dynamic component updating) component environment. However, many ideas introduced in this paper are applicable in other component-based environments. The paper incorporates the following versioning issues: component and type identification, component and type evolution, component version description model and component retrieving based on the version description model. It also outlines a prototype repository designed as a proof of concept.