Re: What will improve Debian most?

[Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au>]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 04:04:22PM +0100, Stephen Gran wrote:
> > I wouldn't say that's particularly quickly; but given the varying release
> > times, it's a bit hard to really tell. Correcting for that:
> >     release  date        days  s.p.d  p.p.d  sg.p.a  pg.p.a
> >     hamm     1998-07-24
> >     slink    1999-03-09  228   2.04   3.27   75%     89%
> >     potato   2000-08-14  524   2.04   3.09   43%     46%
> >     woody    2002-07-20  705   3.65   6.22   42%     48%
> >     sarge    2005-06-06  1052  3.34   6.58   20%     23%
> >     etch     2007-04-08  671   2.23   4.26   9%      10%
> >     lenny    2009-02-14  678   2.81   6.28   10%     12%

> You're also making some implicit assumptions about what is available -
> are there really 9855 new projects that should have been added to Debian
> last year that weren't?  This is based on 
>                            (13601 * .8) - (2.81 * 365)
> (80% increase in total source packages) - (actual increase in source packages)

Don't know where you've got 13,601 from, the numbers I was working with
(stable releases, main) were:

> >     release  sources  packages  src growth  bin growth
> >     etch     10220    18051     17%         19%
> >     lenny    12123    22311     19%         24%

Moore's law (18 month doubling) implies an annual increase of just
under 60%, so if lenny increased at 10% pa by source packages, it needed
another 5x that, so an extra 14 packages per day, or 5128 over the year.

How might you make that up?

    * There are about 1064 additional source packages in sid (main)
      compared to what's in lenny

    * There are about 2490 unclassified normal and wishlist bugs against
      wnpp that seem to be mostly ITP/RFP's

    * There are about 2549 packages in intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10)
      main+universe that aren't in sid (there are 1130 packages in sid
      that aren't in intrepid)

    * There are about 634 unique packages in Debian's contrib/non-free and
      Ubuntu's multiverse/restricted that could potentially be freed

If there's no overlap there, that adds up to a potential 6737 additional
source packages for lenny/main, but even considering overlap, it still
seems in about the right ballpark. And that's not looking particularly
far afield for additional packages.

Or take it the other way -- getting the ~2500 additional packages from
wnpp or Ubuntu (not both) at the current rate of three per day will take
two and a quarter years. And that's just playing catch up, not counting
new software that's developed in that time...

Cheers,
aj