# DepOwl: Detecting Dependency Bugs to Prevent Compatibility Failures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08543 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08543/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Feb 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [How Robust are LLM-Generated Library Imports? An Empirical Study using Stack Overflow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.10818/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Applications depend on libraries to avoid reinventing the wheel. Libraries may have incompatible changes during evolving. As a result, applications will suffer from compatibility failures. There has been much research on addressing detecting incompatible changes in libraries, or helping applications co-evolve with the libraries. The existing solution helps the latest application version work well against the latest library version as an afterthought. However, end users have already been suffering from the failures and have to wait for new versions. In this paper, we propose DepOwl, a practical tool helping users prevent compatibility failures. The key idea is to avoid using incompatible versions from the very beginning. We evaluated DepOwl on 38 known compatibility failures from StackOverflow, and DepOwl can prevent 32 of them. We also evaluated DepOwl using the software repository shipped with Ubuntu-19.10. DepOwl detected 77 unknown dependency bugs, which may lead to compatibility failures.