3 ms·
recent commits and community engagement are better indicators
by tonymet 2y ago
recent commits and community engagement are better indicators
- Retric 2y agoI’d generally rather use a library that hasn’t needed to update in 5 years than something in active development.
- insane_dreamer 2y agothe challenge is differentiating between "haven't need to update it in 5 years because it still solid and compatible with its ecosystem" vs "haven't updated it in 5 years because of any other reason"
- sixothree 2y agoSounds good in theory. But almost every time I use one of these projects, it's in "abandoned" status and definitely needs attention. There is 1 project I can point to that I use that does not actually need any maintenance and another that honestly makes me _extremely_ nervous to use because of lack of maintenance.
- mardifoufs 2y agoCan you give me some examples? Because in my experience even very stable, very "foundational" libs and frameworks that I know about and use almost never go 5 years without any commit/change. There's always either a small bug fix, or some update to a build script, updated documentation, or something. The only repos where that's not the case are usually very niche, and in that case it becomes very hard to judge if the library is just very stable or a minefield of bugs and undesired behavior that no one else reported because no one else is using it.
- Retric 2y agoBeing able to tell if something doesn’t need to be updated is a separate question. There’s many signs such as lacking external dependencies, but the point is such software exists not that there is an easy heuristic for finding it. I think the best examples are the reference implementation of some algorithm. There’s generally room for improvement, but keeping it simple is the point.
- tonymet 2y agoopenssl?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]