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China has a population of 1.3B. Isn't it possible that a lot of them have starred it because it is in Mandarin and targeted primarily towards them? You're not a

China has a population of 1.3B. Isn't it possible that a lot of them have starred it because it is in Mandarin and targeted primarily towards them? You're not accounting for bias.

JesseAldridge 8y ago
Presumeably the number of open issues should be proportional, no? A high star/open-issue ratio suggests people like the library and are not having problems with it. (And if they do have problems those problems are addressed -- i.e. issues are getting closed.)
- yorwba 8y ago
  Closed issues do not necessarily imply that problems are being addressed. Sometimes issues are closed because the maintainer has decided not to address the problem. Sometimes the project simply uses an external bug tracker instead of GitHub issues. Some projects do fix bugs reported in an issue, but they don't have a dedicated person managing issues, so they remain open long after the problem has been solved. I think a high star/open-issue ratio is only a very weak indicator, that you should only use when you have hundreds of repos to evaluate and no domain expertise to decide which actually solves your problem.
  - JesseAldridge 8y ago
    Closing issues without addressing them does indeed present a problem for this approach. The guy behind lodash is especially aggressive about this which is why lodash is the #1 repo on all of GitHub according to this metric (http://repoq.com/lodash/lodash/ http://repoq.com/lodash/lodash/). But I find that people closing issues without addressing them is actually a very rare thing. Far more common is for a project to be abandoned by the maintainer. And this heuristic is quite good at raising a red flag in that situation. Taking a deep dive into a library is of course the most reliable option. But in my experience, really getting an understanding of a large project is a multi-day or even multi-week affair, and this thing serves as an excellent first pass filter.

China has a population of 1.3B. Isn't it possible that a lot of them have starred it because it is in Mandarin and targeted primarily towards them? You're not accounting for bias.

JesseAldridge 8y ago

Presumeably the number of open issues should be proportional, no? A high star/open-issue ratio suggests people like the library and are not having problems with it. (And if they do have problems those problems are addressed -- i.e. issues are getting closed.)

yorwba 8y ago
Closed issues do not necessarily imply that problems are being addressed. Sometimes issues are closed because the maintainer has decided not to address the problem. Sometimes the project simply uses an external bug tracker instead of GitHub issues. Some projects do fix bugs reported in an issue, but they don't have a dedicated person managing issues, so they remain open long after the problem has been solved. I think a high star/open-issue ratio is only a very weak indicator, that you should only use when you have hundreds of repos to evaluate and no domain expertise to decide which actually solves your problem.
- JesseAldridge 8y ago
  Closing issues without addressing them does indeed present a problem for this approach. The guy behind lodash is especially aggressive about this which is why lodash is the #1 repo on all of GitHub according to this metric (http://repoq.com/lodash/lodash/ http://repoq.com/lodash/lodash/). But I find that people closing issues without addressing them is actually a very rare thing. Far more common is for a project to be abandoned by the maintainer. And this heuristic is quite good at raising a red flag in that situation. Taking a deep dive into a library is of course the most reliable option. But in my experience, really getting an understanding of a large project is a multi-day or even multi-week affair, and this thing serves as an excellent first pass filter.