Program evolution: processes of software change
Program evolution: processes of software change
Reference Model for Smooth Growth of Software Systems
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Rules and Tools for Software Evolution Planning and Management
Annals of Software Engineering
Software Evolution Observations Based on Product Release History
ICSM '97 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
ICSE '76 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Software engineering
Metrics and Laws of Software Evolution - The Nineties View
METRICS '97 Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Software Metrics
Evolution in Open Source Software: A Case Study
ICSM '00 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'00)
Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
Managing the Complexity of Large Free and Open Source Package-Based Software Distributions
ASE '06 Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
OPIUM: Optimal Package Install/Uninstall Manager
ICSE '07 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering
MSR '07 Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories
A Model to Understand the Building and Running Inter-Dependencies of Software
WCRE '07 Proceedings of the 14th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
An experience report on scaling tools for mining software repositories using MapReduce
Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
Recovering inter-project dependencies in software ecosystems
Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
A sentence-matching method for automatic license identification of source code files
Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
Supporting software evolution in component-based FOSS systems
Science of Computer Programming
Empirical Software Engineering
Learning from the future of component repositories
Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGSOFT symposium on Component Based Software Engineering
Journal of Systems and Software
Dependency solving: A separate concern in component evolution management
Journal of Systems and Software
How do developers react to API deprecation?: the case of a smalltalk ecosystem
Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 20th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
Life and death of software packages: an evolutionary study of Debian
CASCON '12 Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research
Using topic models to understand the evolution of a software ecosystem
Proceedings of the 2013 9th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering
Mining the impact of evolution categories on object-oriented metrics
Software Quality Control
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Software evolution studies have traditionally focused on individual products. In this study we scale up the idea of software evolution by considering software compilations composed of a large quantity of independently developed products, engineered to work together. With the success of libre (free, open source) software, these compilations have become common in the form of `software distributions', which group hundreds or thousands of software applications and libraries into an integrated system. We have performed an exploratory case study on one of them, Debian GNU/Linux, finding some significant results. First, Debian has been doubling in size every 2 years, totalling about 300 million lines of code as of 2007. Second, the mean size of packages has remained stable over time. Third, the number of dependencies between packages has been growing quickly. Finally, while C is still by far the most commonly used programming language for applications, use of the C++, Java, and Python languages have all significantly increased. The study helps not only to understand the evolution of Debian, but also yields insights into the evolution of mature libre software systems in general.