Enhancement request: Automatically create Component or PackageSet Records for Packages

[mjherzog]

As the volume of Packages and Package Versions is rapidly increasing, the value of a DejaCode Component as a summary record for packages increases accordingly - both as a summary for a project and as a way to group Packages for a Component.
This seems to be an opportunity for machine learning to periodically create or update Component records for Packages stored in DejaCode. It will require design work and an iterative process based on patterns for data package types.

[tdruez]

Note that if you select multiple packages from the package list, and use the "Add to > Component" action, the "Add Component from Package data" feature is available.
This allows the creation of a Component from one or more Packages, combining the common data.
It lacks proper documentation though.

There's also a componentfrompackage management command available to run this Component creation on a whole Dataspace.

[mjherzog]

Philippe reminded me recently about package-sets so it may be the case that it would be more valuable to add package-sets to DejaCode than create Component records.

[tdruez]

@JonoYang Could you provide some resources about package-set implementations and usages so we have a base to look at how we could bring those features into DejaCode? Thanks!

[JonoYang]

@tdruez

Here's the package set model: https://github.com/aboutcode-org/purldb/blob/main/packagedb/models.py#L1408

It is used at https://github.com/aboutcode-org/purldb/blob/main/packagedb/models.py#L535

This model is used to get sets of packages that are related to one another, e.g. for log4j, this could include packages for the binary(log4j.jar), sources (log4j-sources.jar), and the development repo source package (archive from github). We would put those three packages into the same package set to show that they are related, even though they have different purls.

These packages have an attribute package_content, which categorizes the package into one of seven categories:

    CURATION = 1, "curation"
    PATCH = 2, "patch"
    SOURCE_REPO = 3, "source_repo"
    SOURCE_ARCHIVE = 4, "source_archive"
    BINARY = 5, "binary"
    TEST = 6, "test"
    DOC = 7, "doc"

The package_content field is used when running get_enhanced_package (https://github.com/aboutcode-org/purldb/blob/main/packagedb/api.py#L647). The idea is that for a given package, we can fill in missing fields (license, copyright, etc) from other packages in that package's package set. There is a precedence in which package's fields to use, where the lower the package content int value, the greater precedence it has. For example, given a binary package, we would be able to enhance that data with packages in the package set whose package content are below BINARY (1, 2, 3, 4). 6 and 7 would not be used.

package_content is set by the different collectors that handle a purl input and looks up that package data on the upstream repo. For example, in the case of handling maven purls, the package_content field is set here: https://github.com/aboutcode-org/purldb/blob/main/minecode/collectors/maven.py#L381

We create package sets and add packages to package sets in merge_or_create_package (https://github.com/aboutcode-org/purldb/blob/main/minecode/model_utils.py#L410), where we see if there is an existing package with the same type, namespace, name, version. If there is, we add the new package we are creating to the existing package set. Package sets for packages are not created until there is another package with the same type, namespace, name, version that is going to be added.

We have this management command that creates package for source repos of purls listed in an xlsx sheet: https://github.com/aboutcode-org/purldb/blob/main/packagedb/management/commands/create_source_repo_packages.py