Re: Evolution of kernel size

["Jérôme Pinot" <ngc891@gmail.com>]

On 11/11/11 11:51, Ted Ts'o wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 11:33:33PM +0900, Jérôme Pinot wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I took some time to make a graph of the evolution of the size of the
> > linux kernel tar.bz2 since version 1.0 till 3.1 (297 releases).
> > It doesn't count the stable branches (2.6.x.y).
> 
> The question really is what are you trying to show with the graph, and
> what do you plan to use the graph for?  If it is estimating the size
> of disk space that you'll need at some point in the future, that's
> fine.  If it's for entertainment value, that's fine too.

That's exactly the point :-)

> But if it's to try to make some claims about (for example) kernel
> complexity, you'd do better to measure the size of various specific
> subsystems, such as mm, core kernel, a specific file system, etc.  And
> even then, the statistics can be misleading since sometimes
> refactoring to reduce complexity or removing unneeded abstraction
> layers can end up reducing the size of the subsystem, but leave it in
> a more maintainable state.

Measuring code complexity or work/cost of the source code was out of my
scope.

-- 
Jérôme Pinot
http://ngc891.blogdns.net/