[kasabali]

> As of writing the Debian stable release has 96.729 packages in stable and 149.976 packages in unstable

That's a meaningless number because every distribution has different way of packaging things.

What should be counted is the number of source packages, because curl would still be counted as one package regardless of whether your distro split it into 8 (https://packages.debian.org/source/buster/curl) or 3 (https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/curl/)

Even when not doing a comparison between distributions (like when author complains about # of packages per # of LTS maintainers ) this is still the more meaningful count because package maintainers don't deal with every binary package separately, they deal with source packages.

As of today, Debian has 31306 source packages in stable and 34179 in unstable:

    udd=> select count(source) from sources_uniq where release='sid';
     count 
    -------
     34179

    udd=> select count(source) from sources_uniq where release='bullseye';
     count 
    -------
     31306