philips-software / philips-software/SPDXMerge

Merging SBOMs with overlap in their dependencies results in duplicates

Open
#145 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
53
Forks
10
Avg merge
2h 56m
Merged PRs (30d)
1

Description

I generated SBOMs for a frontend and a backend application container image.
Dependencies that exist in both images have the same SPDXID assigned by the tool in each SBOM file.
As I would like to have a single SBOM, I tried to merge these SBOM files using the deep merge feature.
This results in the new SBOM file containing two instances of these dependencies with the same SPDXID.
Should duplicate entries not have been mergen into a single unique entry?

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

No file or test is named in the issue. First reproduce the deep merge with two SBOMs containing dependencies that share an SPDXID, then trace the merge entry point and inspect how duplicate dependency entries are handled. Done means the merged SBOM contains one unique entry for each shared SPDXID and preserves valid entries from both inputs.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.