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5 Conclusion<br />
This thesis has demonstrated that it is possible to implement a search engine over a large<br />
amount of program source code in the setting of an Open Source Linux distribution such as<br />
<strong>Debian</strong>.<br />
While optimizations of the trigram index were necessary, it turned out that the simple<br />
design of DCS which came to mind first was good enough: <strong>Debian</strong> <strong>Code</strong> <strong>Search</strong> could handle<br />
the load which the near-simultaneous announcement via multiple channels (<strong>Debian</strong> mailing<br />
lists, twitter, reddit, …) caused, with only a few hiccups during the 2-3 day period of high<br />
load. It should be stressed that in this initial deployment, only one server was used.<br />
<strong>Debian</strong> <strong>Code</strong> <strong>Search</strong> uses metadata from <strong>Debian</strong> such as the package’s popularity, package<br />
dependencies, its description, and others. This fact validates the usefulness of <strong>Debian</strong>’s<br />
rigid quality assurance processes such as the recent switch to machine-readable copyright<br />
information.<br />
After the launch of DCS, many people have written mails in which they thank me, and<br />
the general sentiment was very positive. But not only do <strong>Debian</strong> developers and users feel<br />
positive about it, they also use it in bug reports, when chatting and when discussing on<br />
mailing lists to prove their points, link to a specific line in the source, or as a way to analyze<br />
the scope of a problem.<br />
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