Any stats for quantifying Debian's maintenance magnitude?
Disclaimer: I tried to jump back into the fray last night. Ended up
with two epic long chapters now sitting in draft. It was just too
much..
Up this morning and now seeing all kinds of "that topic" related
activity again today. Mixed in among those threads was something that
comes out about this time each week from the PHP folks
(phpdoc@lists.php.net). It's their mental "toggle" to remind people to
check in and help, but that's not my primary point here. Today's
output for them is referencing *24309* cumulative user notes
potentially needing some kind of TLC.... _this week_.
Twenty-four THOUSAND plus.. THAT is just document notes, and that is
ONE project, albeit one of the larger ones around. And that's not any
other activity that developers are doing on that project in the same
way Debian developers work on so many different aspects here..
An immediate Debian example that *delightfully* stuns me every time it
happens is regarding "apt-get update". I've had "apt-get update" get
disconnected for whatever reason so have had to run it right away
again to complete it. Invariably there are even more new updates
within the sometimes only five, ten minutes lapse time in between
update attempts..
Seeing those in the context of being a seeming final process
checkmark, I've been a-suming that the visually apparent minute by
minute constant change represents developers hard at work all OVER the
place ALL the time..
That all said, does Debian generate any kind of statistical
information related to developer activity?
Yes, I know you can't quantify the cognitive work involved.. I'm just
thinking about the aspects of it that can be quantified because
they're being registered in a server somewhere for posterity.. My
thought process is that it might help put some perspective somehow, I
don't know quite how, but just SOME kind of perspective on what
developers face over time...
Some of that thought process includes things like... I've noticed
people's command outputs that share an eye catching 30 packages that
still need upgraded in their systems. It would be easy for someone
with that low count to say, "What?! Only 30?! What are developers
doing with the REST of their time?!"
Meanwhile k/t the hodgepodge I've got going here, I've been fortunate
to see numbers in the thousands, not to mention regular references to
that there are TENS OF THOUSANDS of possibilities for things out
there...
IN FACT... just ran "apt-cache search the" and received back a 2.4MB
sized file containing 37,601 lines. I just quickly scanned the output.
Everything I saw showed one single line per package name. I've never
had a problem with apt-cache duplicating output so I'm trusting it
didn't this time, either. Does that 37,601 sound possible as the
number of available packages containing the word "the" that users can
download today? Yes, no, maybe so?
Quantitatively multiply out those tens of thousands of packages times
how many seconds, how many minutes per each that general maintenance
takes, let alone any other developer driven [function] that might be
performed on them...
Oh, wait.... NOT done yet... Each package does NOT contain only one
single solitary standalone file, either.. Each package's files needs
its due head nod within that quantifying process, too..
37,601 lines, each appearing to represent a unique software package
that theoretically should receive regular developer tending.
*hm* :)
Cindy
--
Cindy-Sue Causey
Talking Rock, Pickens County, Georgia, USA
* Fencesitter Extraordinaire *
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