Just finished a checkpoint of my current development project at work. There are only six developers, and we only have about 18 dependencies on 3rd-party libraries. Even on something that simple, getting the bugs and unresolved issues (after developers had performed their final check-ins of code) cleared up in order to get a 100% pass on the suite of unit tests ended up taking 14 hours over two days. Coordinating changes to the persistence, business, and presentation layers and being able to see the big picture in order to isolate bugs requires intense concentration on my part.
On my way out of the office at 20:35, I was thinking about the some 10,000 source packages in Debian and the coordination and effort required to get a release out the door. I am awed. Debian Release Team, you rock. Thanks for Sarge, and I look forward to the Etch release.