The Tools We Use

Author

Spinellis, Diomidis

Author_Institution

Athens Univ. of Econ. & Bus., Athens

Volume

24

Issue

4

fYear

2007

Firstpage

20

Lastpage

21

Abstract

What´s the state of the art in the tools we use to build software? To answer this question, I let a powerful server build from source code about 7,000 open source packages over a period of a month. The packages I built form a subset of the FreeBSD operating system ports collection, comprising a wide spectrum of application domains: from desktop utilities and biology applications to databases and development tools. The collection is representative of modern software because, unlike say a random sample of SourceForge.net projects, FreeBSD developers have found these programs useful enough to port to FreeBSD.

Keywords

operating systems (computers); public domain software; software tools; FreeBSD operating system ports collection; SourceForge.net projects; open source packages; software tools; Application software; Central Processing Unit; Embedded system; Java; Productivity; Programming profession; Software maintenance; Software measurement; System software; Unified modeling language; abstraction; build-process; declarative language; domain-specific language; executable UML; programming language;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Software, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0740-7459

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MS.2007.121

Filename

4267595