Dependancies of Debian Archive (FYI)
Let's ponder about a question of "How important is a package?"
One measure is "how many other packages depend on it?"
I did some quick(*) research(**) on the Debian archive (stable, testing,
unstable combined) and found out followings:
12% of packages had dependencies with more than 5 other packages
88% of packages had dependencies with less than 6 other packages
24% of packages had dependencies with more than 1 other packages
76% of packages had dependencies with one other package or none
As you can see, most (>75%-90%) packages have very limited impact to
the archive consistency. (I know impact of Build-dep also needs be
assessed but its effects should also be very limited too.)
Currently, minor release does not allow any upstream version bumping but
just security bug fixes. I wonder that is the right approach or not for
these *less* important packages.
Just a note to remind well known facts in quantitative manner :-) Kinda
interesting, eh?
Good night
Osamu
(*) It was more than 1 hour on 2GHz machine.
Multi-level dependencies were considered.
http://people.debian.org/~osamu/pub/pckg-stat
(**) The full list is at http://people.debian.org/~osamu/pub/rev-stat.321
Top winners are:
11845 libdb1-compat
11845 libc6
7717 libdb4.0
7593 libdb2
7480 libgdbmg1
7369 perl-base
7365 perl-5.004-base
7364 perl-modules
7364 perl-doc
7364 perl-5.004-doc
7364 perl-5.004
7364 perl
6780 fileutils
6735 perl-5.005-base
6732 perl-5.005
6574 debconf
6223 zlib1g
5297 debianutils
4643 xfree86-common
4561 libfreetype6
4536 xlibs
4132 ncurses-base
4105 libncurses5
...
--
~\^o^/~~~ ~\^.^/~~~ ~\^*^/~~~ ~\^_^/~~~ ~\^+^/~~~ ~\^:^/~~~ ~\^v^/~~~ +++++
Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> Cupertino CA USA, GPG-key: A8061F32
.''`. Debian Reference: post-installation user's guide for non-developers
: :' : http://qref.sf.net and http://people.debian.org/~osamu
`. `' "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software" --- Social Contract
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