From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2005-03-04T08:43:29+09:00
Subject: Re: RAA Status & b

Ben Giddings wrote:
>
> 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.

Yes it is, especially if you want to make it truly useful.

That's why I think that a very simple system of ranking (one to five stars)
and commmenting by real users of the library (just like Amazon does for
books) would be very effective and take very little effort to implement.

Curt