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I tried to improve my estimate of RAA's cost by running the script shown below against 11% of the archive (by project count); that subset would cost around $20M (600000 lines of code), leaving the total cost of the RAA under $191 million. I then compared it to a revision of the cost of CPAN computed in 2004 which lowers the original estimate substantially.

The final figure is somewhat biased because I didn't pick the projects randomly (so the remainder should be smaller on average), but it still serves as an upper bound.

Comparison with CPAN

The cost of CPAN was estimated to be under $677 million in 2004. That analysis was faulty because it considered all of CPAN as a single project with 15.5 million LOCs, which would inflate the numbers due to the nonlinear effort estimate equation .

The error introduced will be smaller than

where P is the number of projects and L the average project size.