2007/9/2, Adrian Hey
Other meaningless measures that have been suggested are the rate of patch submissions of the number of developers involved. I seem to remember someone recently suggesting that libraries that score highly in on this regard should be elevated to "blessed" status.
I don't see them as completely meaningless, such a library is more likely to be corrected if you report a bug, and if a library lacks certain features but seems interesting, I'm less inclined to give it a chance if nobody worked on it for years than if there's an active community, frequent update and a roadmap. Still it's not sufficient, I agree with you.
Personally the first things I tend to look at are things like the quality of documentation and the presence of of some kind of test suite. Both these are IMO opinion pretty reliable indications that the author(s) have actually devoted some time and effort into deciding what it is that the library aims to achieve and have designed a coherent API (and have made reasonable effort to ensure that it actually works). I tend lose interest pretty fast if even basic Haddock API documentation is either non-existant, or consists of nothing but type signatures, or that plus broken link to some ancient postscript paper.
Yes, those are some of the more interesting metrics, the CPAN try to take them into account with the recent Kwalitee metric. Thing is we probably won't find _the best_ metric (if such a thing existed, I think it will already have been found) but we can try to give some useful indications. -- Jedaï