Functional Analysis of Gnu/Linux Distributions. A Case Study of Two Distributions

GNU/linux distributions are very well coordinated and assembled pieces of software. Each one is in some sense a snapshot of a large fraction of the libre software development landscape at the time of the release. The components of such software systems (about 50-100 millions of lines of source code) are built by hundreds of independent groups of developers, with no formal connection to the group releasing the whole system. In this article, we present some quantitative and comparative information about the software included in two such distributions (Red Hat and Debian) and insist especially on the number of lines of source code. Both distributions are doubling their size every two years and both present similar patterns in programming language usage and package size distributions.