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Agreed. For libs that are "afternoon-y" in their scope (so, not an HTTP server or crypto), if you need to get off the fence you can use some cheap heuristics to
by lgessler 6y ago
Agreed. For libs that are "afternoon-y" in their scope (so, not an HTTP server or crypto), if you need to get off the fence you can use some cheap heuristics to assess the quality of a library without auditing its code. For instance, you can look at its popularity (in downloads or Github stars), its release/version history, its number of open issues, and its development activity. If I see high issue counts and many major releases with breaking changes, I'm going to avoid it. If I see 2+ years of stability with mostly minor releases, low issue counts, and high use rates, I figure it's going to probably be better than whatever half-baked solution I could scribble in an afternoon.
- kmike84 6y agoI wouldn't consider a high number of open issues a problem on its own. All big popular projects with a history have a high number of open issues. There are some exceptions, who may be closing isses aggressvely, but it is more about a style of managing of those issues, not about project health. Over time an issue tracker inevitably becomes a collection of hard-to-reproduce bugs, incomplete patches, underspecified feature requests, random tracebacks, etc. Maintainers can choose to just close everything which is not actionable immediately, or be in comfort with such issues, and let them live in the bug tracker. I personally like a style when an issue is closed only if it is fixed, or if it doesn't contain useful information, or if it is a duplicate. A better indicator is activity and responsiveness of the maintainers in the issue tracker.