On 22 November 2010 19:39, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgrif...@gmail.com> wrote: > My boss just brought this book over to my desk. It's one of those > theory books that's all about measuring lines of code and whatnot. > > But the reason he brought it over, is Chapter 8: "Beyond Lines of > Code: Do We Need More Complex Metrics?". Two pages in, it begins with: > > **Measuring the Source Code** > We have selected for our case study the ArchLinux software > distribution (http://archlinux.org), which contains thousands of > packages, all open source. ArchLinux is a lightweight GNU/Linux > distribution whose maintainers refuse to modify the source code > packaged for the distribution, in order to meet the goal of > drastically reducing the time that elapses between the official > release of a package and its integration into the distribution. > ... > Because of the size of ArchLinux, using it as a case study gives us > access to the original source code of thousands of open source > projects, through the build scripts used by ABS (see Example 8-1) > > The chapter goes on with statistics and all that junk. They're not > studying Arch, but using Arch as a launch pad for getting large > amounts of open source source code for analysis. The numbers are > interesting: > > The ArchLinux repositories contained 4096 packages (as of April 2010), > with some of the packages being different versions of the same > upstream project. After removing different versions, we obtained a > sample of 4015 packages, containing 1272748 source code files. Among > all those files, 576511 were written in C. However, there were > repeated files. In the overall sample, only 776573 were unique files; > in the C subsample, only 338831 were unique files. From these unique C > files, 212167 were nonheader files and 126664 were header files. >
Great! Proud to see Arch here :) The author might also be an Archer, who knows. BTW I also like the idea of your boss coming to give you the book like "Oh and there this O'Reilly book about some of the stuff you do...". -- Guillaume