For those of you less inclined to surfing all over my website, here’s a quick recap:
Part 1: Did you know that the Ubuntu software repository contains 23,164 packages? I also introduce the Constructive Cost Model (COCOMO), and finally, reference an article quoting that Debian ‘cost’ 1.9 billion dollars to develop back in year 2000.
Part 2: I detail my plan of attack to find out how much the Ubuntu distribution ‘cost’ to develop using COCOMO and SLOCCount by David Wheeler. Without his excellent program, this article would not be possible.
Downloading the source code took nearly 2 days, due to the nature of apt-get, you must first build dependencies, then download the actual source code. There were some annoying programs that once downloaded, require user input (such as LILO) and that paused the downloading process until I provided some human input.
It took over 8 hours for SLOCCount to process all 51,447 files downloaded, with a 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
I started this project with a brand new Gutsy Gibbon installation. By the time all was said and done,my hard drive contained 92.8 GB of gzipped source files, patches, graphics, etc – everything needed to build Ubuntu from scratch- and installed nearly 10 GB of dependencies.