Hi, Quoting Steffen Möller (2020-07-04 13:24:36) > I just skimmed through https://trends.debian.net/ and am impressed. Many > thanks for these figures. same from me! :) > Do you accept wishes for additional graphs? Mine would be on the number of > build dependencies as a scale for software complexity and how this evolved > over time. My hunch is that later software has more dependencies than earlier > ones. Would of course be cool to also have other software metrics over time. > Anyway - fanstastic plots already! This is very hard to measure. How do you count A|B dependencies? How do you count dependencies only on architecture X? How do you count dependencies on virtual packages for which there are several providers, each pulling a different set of packages in? Also, we are probably not just interested in the direct dependencies but also in indirect dependencies, so it's not only the build dependencies we have to look at but also the runtime dependencies. Do Recommends count? One possible metric would be to compute the lower bound (strong dependencies) as well as the upper bound (dependency closure) for each source package using dose-ceve. Still, I wonder how useful it is to know the resulting number. Some ecosystems prefer many small packages while others have only few big packages. A related graph that you might find interesting is this one: https://bootstrap.debian.net/history.html This is the minimal set of packages necessary to build all other packages, assuming native compilation and without build profiles. As you can see, the number increases over time, suggesting that packages indeed add more and more build dependencies as well as runtime dependencies. > What is right in the open but I do not see discussed in this context is the > sheer amount of packages that are added to the distribution. It is a raise > from close to 10000 to similarly close to 30000 in a bit over 14 years, so > this makes close to 1500 packages/anno or close to 4 per day, equally > throughout all these years. I don't know if it makes a big difference, but this is probably not accounting for the packages that are getting removed per year? > Knowing about all the time I spend on checking copyrights already, not always > successfully, I know about the enormous work our FTPmasters invest into > keeping this up. So, many thanks! Thank you!! :) cheers, josch
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