230 million SLOC

[Dan Martin]

> Hello,
> Any thoughts on this exciting article about 230 million SLOC (lines of
> code) in Sarge. I'm surprised to search the lists and find no 
> comments... How about Ubuntu's size?
> 
> http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2005/3/up6-3Amor.pdf

My *opinion* is that the report is misleading.  This report is a count of
SLOC of free software in Debian, not of Debian.  It refers to every package
linked in Sarge (in specific repos) as being a piece of Debian.  As a
result, nearly every line of code written in OSS is counted in the SLOC for
Debian.  

The majority of the software in Sarge is not a part of the OS itself, but
rather software that *can* be installed on the OS.  Further, even for the
software I would consider part of the OS (kernel, Xfree/X.org, etc.), most
of the code isn't written by Debian maintainers.  It is code *used by*
Debian.  

Then, the reports comes to the conclusion that Debian is one of the largest,
if not the largest, software systems in the world.  They compare their
skewed SLOC to the SLOC of other operating systems, most of these counts
being for just the operating system, and not all the software one can
install on that operating system.  An accurate comparison?  Hardly.  If you
counted the SLOC in the Windows software available on download.com alone,
I'd bet Debian and everything in its repos would be dwarfed.

I'm not criticizing Debian at all.  I'm criticizing the report.  For a
useful comparison with another OS, you need to compare it with every piece
of software that could be installed on it.  

This report will likely result in misleading buzz in Linux trade rags.

-Dan