OpenSourceWatershed is a project aimed at understanding the relationship between distributions (downstream) and the individual software components (upstream). It is the basis for a larger study of distributions and their evolution. It is distrology. In the future, more distro oriented statistics will be available. More details are below. For now search in the top right for your favorite package to see how up to date the different distributions. Or look at the right to see what new releases happened in the last 24 hours.

The aggregate analysis is done over twenty packages including firefox, gcc and openssh. The full package list is in the OSCON slides. In the future, users will be able to set custom groups. The three forms of analysis are percent obsolete, the average number of newer releases per package and the time since the oldest new release. In other words the lag is the amount of time a distro had to move to a newer package.

There are errors in the database which you can help fix. Just email me if you find one. In the future, you will be able to fix it yourself. For more information about the process behind this analysis please read my senior thesis or email me.

Rank	Distro	Codename	% Obsolete	Avg # New Rels	Avg Lag
1	arch		30.0%	1.50	7w
2	fedora	16	40.0%	3.15	19w
3	sabayon	5	55.0%	10.30	27w
4	freebsd	9	64.70%	9.29	61w
5	gentoo		70.0%	4.00	20w
6	ubuntu	oneiric	75.0%	7.00	31w
7	debian	squeeze	90.0%	32.90	79w
8	slackware	13.37	94.11%	11.29	44w
9	opensuse	11.3	95.0%	20.35	81w
10	funtoo		100.0%	28.05	87w

Rank	Distro	Codename	% Obsolete	Avg # New Rels	Avg Lag
1	arch		30.0%	1.50	7w
2	gentoo		35.0%	1.25	7w
3	fedora	17	40.0%	2.75	11w
4	debian	wheezy	50.0%	17.80	32w
5	ubuntu	precise	50.0%	3.60	25w
6	opensuse	11.4	50.0%	3.20	15w
7	sabayon	5	50.0%	9.85	18w
8	freebsd	10	62.5%	8.44	38w
9	slackware	current	82.35%	9.65	29w
10	funtoo		100.0%	24.00	73w

Much more work will happen to OSWatershed in the future. The most urgent addition is distro pages which will feature data on multiple branches. User accounts are also coming in the future. Users will be able to add more data into the database and configure their own package groups to use for analysis. Ideally, spreading the work over a larger number of users (crowd-sourcing) will make the data scope more manageable. To get Scott working on these new feature email him and let him know you are waiting!