Linker Ideas

[simisimon]

Our evaluation showed that the equality-based linker often creates links which do not make sense. This is often the case when type information about the value nodes to be linked is missing. However, the Stack Overflow analysis and the commit history analysis shows showed us kinds of links between different technologies (e.g. Maven and Docker) or due to specific configuration types (e.g., version number).

Hence, we should probably move away from a equality-based linker. Instead, we could focus on technology-specific linker or dependency-specific linker. This way, we allow developer not only to develop their own plugins but also to implement their own linker. Otherwise, we need to improve the equality-based linker, for example by allowing only links between options whose values are equal. This way we would exclude links between options without type information, which should significantly reduce the number of links.