From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2005-03-04T08:28:11+09:00
Subject: Re: RAA Status & b

Tom Copeland wrote:
> Well, the stats are somewhat understood - they're based on totting up
> all the bugs/downloads/pageviews/CVS checkins/forum posts for a project
> and then munging them.  But if I was pressed to explain exactly why a
> project had a 0% activity percentile on a particular day, I would wander
> off for a cup of coffee.

Right, but "activity percentile", in my experience, is not terribly 
useful anyhow, and possibly even deceptive.  If people really are 
interested in foo-lib and keep going there, but no foo-lib development 
activity is going on, wouldn't that bump up the "activity percentile" 
without necessarily indicating that the software is useful, or getting 
better?

*shrug*

It just seems like it would be really useful to be able to tell at a 
glance whether or not a library was probably going to be good. 
Something that worked something like: "If the version is greater than 
1.0, many other people use it, and it has no unresolved bugs it is 
probably pretty stable" => STABLE, "if the version number is less than 
1.0, many other people use it, and there are daily checkins then it may 
be unstable, but someone will probably listen if I report a bug" => 
UNSTABLE BUT ACTIVE.  "If the version number is less than 0.4, the last 
checkin was 12 months ago, and there are reported, but unfixed bugs, it 
is probably not very useful" => UNSTABLE AND ABANDONED.

Hard to try to create a program to do this kind of heuristic tho.

Ben