From Bazaar to Kibbutz: How Freedom Deals with Coherence in the Debian Project

The goal of obtaining a coherent distribution of software packages where all programs interact smoothly increases its complexity with the number of applications, the number of architectures involved, and the number of system configurations supported. The Debian project aims at producing a software system with thousands of components running on eleven different hardware architectures, with three different operating
system kernels. This paper describes the project and how the work of hundreds of people that never meet one with another can be coordinated to produce reasonably robust and integrated systems.