Nicholas?

No, mainly because I wasn't on that team, but the distro one.

Oddly enough, something useful did come out of that work. The "nullfs" kernel module later became part of a customer's proprietary backup solution.

When I look back on my years there, the failures I see were primarily not technological in nature. I don't know if that's good fortune, or an experience most software developers have. I've seen some ugly, ugly code, more of it proprietary than free.

Even dpkg is better described as "self-consciously eccentric" than "ugly".