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I don't understand the singling out of Debian. Debian includes an unbelievable number of software packages, a vanishingly small minority being the core OS.

by abenga 3y ago

lproven 3y ago
[Article author here] > I don't understand the singling out of Debian. To counter: I don't understand why it would matter which distro. It is simply because Debian published these statistics. I couldn't find any other distro vendor that did. I used those numbers because I could get those particular numbers. At this scale, it doesn't matter which distro. What do you estimate the scale of the size difference is between general-purpose distros? An order of magnitude? Surely not as much as 2 OoM, and probably less than 1 OoM. Maybe ITRO of 25-50% for most non-enterprise ones.
- abenga 3y ago
  I think my comment was probably unclear. My problem is the comparison of the reported lines of code between the Debian Project and Oberon OS. The reported lines of code for debian include everything in the repos. The OS, compilers, interpreters, DBMSs, Document managers (Libreoffice, Texlive are probably massive), games, etc. To make it like for like, you would need to compare Debian and Oberon + all the software written for Oberon.
  - lproven 3y ago
    I was simply picking 2 extremes. The real interest here is the midpoint, which is Plan 9. The 9front image is half a gig, and that too includes everything: apps, demos, games, the entire thing. As I said: « “The kernel is 5,119,091 bytes - 5MB or so. “The entire distribution including all sources, documents, local Git repository and binaries is circa 530MB for amd64.” The Plan 9 kernel has 38 system calls. I’ve not been able to find a firm number for Linux, but I have some estimates. As of 2016, kernel 4.7 had about 335. By 2017 that was up to 341. I’ve tried to estimate the number for kernel 6.8 and I think there are 520 across all architectures. » ISTM that you're obsessing over the exact position of one end, whereas in fact, given that we are talking of a difference of roughly 5 orders of magnitude -- five zeroes -- it would make no difference at all if we included every program ever written for every variant of Oberon that ever existed, and the most minimal possible Debian system that can run two shells at once. Debian 12 is on the order of 150,000 lines of code for every single line of A2.

I don't understand the singling out of Debian. Debian includes an unbelievable number of software packages, a vanishingly small minority being the core OS.

by abenga 3y ago

I don't understand the singling out of Debian. Debian includes an unbelievable number of software packages, a vanishingly small minority being the core OS.

lproven 3y ago

[Article author here] > I don't understand the singling out of Debian. To counter: I don't understand why it would matter which distro. It is simply because Debian published these statistics. I couldn't find any other distro vendor that did. I used those numbers because I could get those particular numbers. At this scale, it doesn't matter which distro. What do you estimate the scale of the size difference is between general-purpose distros? An order of magnitude? Surely not as much as 2 OoM, and probably less than 1 OoM. Maybe ITRO of 25-50% for most non-enterprise ones.

abenga 3y ago
I think my comment was probably unclear. My problem is the comparison of the reported lines of code between the Debian Project and Oberon OS. The reported lines of code for debian include everything in the repos. The OS, compilers, interpreters, DBMSs, Document managers (Libreoffice, Texlive are probably massive), games, etc. To make it like for like, you would need to compare Debian and Oberon + all the software written for Oberon.
- lproven 3y ago
  I was simply picking 2 extremes. The real interest here is the midpoint, which is Plan 9. The 9front image is half a gig, and that too includes everything: apps, demos, games, the entire thing. As I said: « “The kernel is 5,119,091 bytes - 5MB or so. “The entire distribution including all sources, documents, local Git repository and binaries is circa 530MB for amd64.” The Plan 9 kernel has 38 system calls. I’ve not been able to find a firm number for Linux, but I have some estimates. As of 2016, kernel 4.7 had about 335. By 2017 that was up to 341. I’ve tried to estimate the number for kernel 6.8 and I think there are 520 across all architectures. » ISTM that you're obsessing over the exact position of one end, whereas in fact, given that we are talking of a difference of roughly 5 orders of magnitude -- five zeroes -- it would make no difference at all if we included every program ever written for every variant of Oberon that ever existed, and the most minimal possible Debian system that can run two shells at once. Debian 12 is on the order of 150,000 lines of code for every single line of A2.