Measurnig maintainer scripts LOCs

After some discussions which touched them in various (Debian and non-Debian) mailing lists, I got interested in having a closer look to maintainer scripts. The first question I was asking myself is «how big they are?».

As an absolutely empirical, non-scientific test, I hacked a couple of scripts to graph the distribution of maintainer script lengths (measured as LOCs). I just run them on /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.{post,pre}{inst,rm} on my laptop, which contains ATM 3612 scripts. Here is the result:

The obvious (though, I repeat, absolutely empirically obtained) point is that, as expected, most of the scripts are really short, with 1/3 of them being just 7 LOCs. And I guess you can guess (sorry) what the 7 lines are about:

    #!/bin/sh
    set -e
    # Automatically added by dh_makeshlibs
    if [ "$1" = "configure" ]; then
            ldconfig
    fi
    # End automatically added section

dear old debhelper boilerplate.

The longest script, not shown properly in the graph due to my low gnuplot karma, is 1905 LOCs (and the winner is: /var/lib/dpkg/info/xserver-xorg.postinst). The shortest scripts are 5 LOCs, but they are structurally equivalent to the 7 LOCs above, sometimes invoking some other idempotent update-bla tool, and sporting less newlines.