Debian Developers Prefer Teams and Git

Lucas Nussbaum has been crunching some numbers that lead him to conclude that "Debian is (still) changing." Over the years a few trends have emerged as Nussbaum demonstrates using snapshot.debian.org and a data mining script.

In a blog post earlier today, Nussbaum posted graphs of some of the trends he's seeing in Debian package development. His first graph shows that the number of team-maintained packages have seen a dramatic increase the last several years while the number of "not co-maintained" and small independent group maintained packages have remained fairly steady. Nussbaum believes these numbers show the team-maintained model is preferred by today's developers.

Nussbaum was also interested in learning about Version Control Software use. He found that the number of packages not using a VCS is declining while those using Git are increasing dramatically. SVN saw a rise in 2007, but hit its peak in 2011 and is also now in decline.

Package helpers and and patch systems were two other areas addressed. Nussbaum found that those using debhelper are declining while dh use has been increasing since 2009 and is now the most widely used package helper. See Nussbaum's post for more details and his cool graphs.