Small world characteristics of FLOSS distributions

Over the years, Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) distributions have become more and more complex and recent versions contain tens of thousands of packages. This has made it impossible to do quality control by hand. Instead, distribution editors must look to automated methods to ensure the quality of their distributions.
In the present paper, we present some insights into the general structure of FLOSS distributions. We notably show that such distributions have the characteristics of a small world network: there are only a few important packages, and many less important packages. Identifying the important packages can help editors focus their efforts on parts of the distribution where errors will have important consequences.

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