Multi Software Product Lines in the Wild

Modern software systems are often built from customizable and inter-dependent components. Such customizations usually define which features are offered by the components, and may depend on backend components being configured in a specific way. As such system become very large, with a huge number of possible configurations and complex dependencies between components, maintenance and ensuring the consistency of such systems is a challenge. In this paper, we propose a Multi Software Product Line model to capture the complexity of such systems and pave the way to formal studies on them. We applied and implemented our model on a full Linux Distribution of almost 40,000 interconnected components and 3 million features, and present some initial analysis we did on this model.