GNU and Linux grew together and supported each other!

Posted Jun 1, 2011 20:01 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313)
In reply to: GNU and Linux grew together and supported each other! by lxoliva
Parent article: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

note that the earlier comparison you point at is comparing the size of compressed source archives, while this one is comparing lines of source code. remember things like logos will not compress well (and will not count as many lines of code either)

they kernel hasn't quite doubled in that timeframe

2.6.21 is 10332702 lines
3.0-rc1 is 16700965 lines

but it's gown a lot. have the GNU tools been growing that fast?

in any case, unless someone points out a flaw in the tools (as opposed to just other studies that did other types of checks) I don't have reason to believe that the numbers presented in this article are wrong. the code to run this is available, so if you think there's a mistake in it, point it out.

given how large gcc and gdb are, I would be interested in seeing the results when run against the standard install rather than the entire repository

GNU and Linux grew together and supported each other!

Posted Jun 2, 2011 1:17 UTC (Thu) by lxoliva (guest, #40702) [Link]

There is one pretty obvious flaw with the way the study that found a similarity was conducted: it disregards GNU packages that are in Debian and that haven't been repackaged by Ubuntu.

As for logos, the GNU tools I counted don't contain any AFAIK. Unlike Linux.

Now, if you want to compare a standard install, it would be just fair to apply the same standard to both sides, namely, discarding unusual drivers and architectures from Linux too. Or, if you want to claim they're important, then so are the less-than-common languages, architectures and operating systems supported by GCC, GDB and glibc, the architectures and object file formats supported by binutils, and all the options (or lack thereof) of Gnome.

Anyway, even if Linux *had* doubled in size in that time-frame and GNU hadn't grown at all, my very limited study with just a few GNU components showed they were 3 times larger that Linux, so these GNU tools alone would still be at least 50% larger than Linux.