Linux Journal
Metrics and Laws of Software Evolution - The Nineties View
METRICS '97 Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Software Metrics
Implications of Evolution Metrics on Software Maintenance
ICSM '98 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance
Evolution in Open Source Software: A Case Study
ICSM '00 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'00)
Evolution and Growth in Large Libre Software Projects
IWPSE '05 Proceedings of the Eighth International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution
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
Macro-level software evolution: a case study of a large software compilation
Empirical Software Engineering
Strong dependencies between software components
ESEM '09 Proceedings of the 2009 3rd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Impact of Installation Counts on Perceived Quality: A Case Study on Debian
WCRE '11 Proceedings of the 2011 18th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering
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Software evolution has been studied at a variety of granularities. The evolution of code, classes, groups of classes, programs and finally large scale applications have been examined in detail. What lies beyond is the study of the evolution of software collections that group together many individual applications. Collecting software and distributing it via a central repository has been popular in the open source world, and only recently caught on commercially with Apple's Mac app store and Microsoft's Windows store. Similar to other papers on evolution, the value lies in our observations. We extract facts and patterns about the system which have not been documented before. Our study will focus on the Debian software collection because it is widely used, extremely large and easily accessibility. Debian is a software collection based off the Linux kernel with a large number of packages spread over multiple hardware platforms. In this paper we ask: How is Debian evolving and can our observations influence the future design of large software collections? This paper describes the life cycle of a package from inception to end by carrying out a twelve year longitudinal study using the Ultimate Debian Database (UDD). The birth of packages is examined to see how Debian is growing. Conversely, package death is also analyzed to determine the lifespan of these packages. Moreover, four different package attributes are examined. They are package age, package bugs, package maintainers and package popularity. These four attributes combine together to give us the overall biography of Debian packages.