[georgewsinger]

> As of writing the Debian stable release has 96.729 packages in stable and 149.976 packages in unstable. That is a massive amount of software packages.

Does anyone know how this compares to other distros? In particular NixOS/nixpkgs is of interest.

[TheDong]

The closest we have to a source of truth for that is the table on repology: https://repology.org/repositories/statistics

By that table, debian 12 has 32k packages, and nixpkgs stable has 67k

That said, repology doesn't track everything nixpkgs has nor everything debian has.

It's also difficult to compare debian and nixpkgs.

Debian has several packages for one thing where nixpkgs has only one, i.e. debian has "sqlite3, sqlite3-doc, libsqlite3-dev", while nixpkgs has the single "sqlite" package with the attributes "sqlite.bin, sqlite.dev" (and no docs split out I guess? They're probably in .out)

Because debian splits out dev packages from binary packages, that artificially inflates the number.

Another choice which makes the number very hard to compare is packaging style choices for certain dependencies.

For example, in debian, a go package's dependencies must all be packaged as their own packages (https://go-team.pages.debian.net/packaging.html#_dependencie...).

This leads to stuff like "golang-github-hashicorp-terraform-svchost-dev", a package that is only used as a library to build terraform. I'd argue it's not a user-facing package, just an implementation detail of the terraform package, but the count you mention above certainly includes it.

nixpkgs, on the other hand, is fine with not splitting out each dependency as a full package on its own right, so go and rust libraries are much more sparse in nixpkgs.

All of this is a lot of words to say "comparing numbers is hard, repology is the best we have right now"

[Asdrubalini]

Official repo [0] says more than 80,000.

Edit: it seems to be the largest software repo according to this (2020) [1].

[0] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs [1] https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixpkgs-has-been-the-largest-r...

[yakubin]

I'm not on NixOS, but I do use Nix as a package manager on Debian and this is what I got:

  $ nix-env -qa | wc -l
  39168

Of course, it's important to note that Nix doesn't lag behind upstream as much as Debian. Actually, it's usually one of the first places where new versions of packages appear. So you don't have the problem such as the one Debian has with maintaining PHP 7.4.

[faho]

Raw package count doesn't really compare, considering that Debian splits up packages a lot.

For example they have a lot of "-dbg", "-devel" and "-doc" packages that other distros might just choose to leave in the main package instead.