About Debian Code Search

Debian Code Search (DCS) is a search engine for source code — it searches all the open source projects which are included in the Debian archive (the "main" distribution only, not non-free or contrib). Currently, that includes about 18000 packages with 140 GiB of source code.

The search engine itself is based on Russ Cox’ codesearch tools, meaning it uses Regular Expressions as input. Like the codesearch tools, it was implemented in Go.

DCS is the subject of Michael Stapelberg’s computer science bachelor thesis (1 MiB PDF).

There also is a 50 minute talk about DCS which you can watch at https://youtu.be/4B1Kcw0LrJ0 (with English subtitles).

If you want to read more about Debian Code Search, check out the Debian Code Search posts in Michael Stapelberg’s blog.

You can also check how other projects are using Debian Code Search, we list them on third party projects.

In case you have any questions which are not answered by the FAQ, feel free to contact us.

-- Michael Stapelberg, 2012-10-02