Hugh Perkins wrote:
A really simple way to track the "quality" of a package is to display the number of downloads.
A posteriorae, this works great in other download sites.
We can easily hypothesize about why a download count gives a decent indication of some measure of quality: - more people downloading it means more people specifically wanted that package - more people downloading it means more people trying it, giving feedback, maybe giving patches - and, of course, it's an objective measure, easy to do
I don't agree. The idea that any arbitrary "objective" measure provides any indication quality seems quite wrong to me, especially this one. The problem is the effect of positive feedback. The popularity of MS Winders or Office Suite are the obvious examples. We all know why these are used on 95% or whatever of the worlds PCs, and it has nothing whatever to do with quality. Or a little closer to home, the popularity of Haskell vs. Clean. 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 cynic like me could just as well regard this as an indication of the complete opposite, that the library was being developed by an uncoordinated troop of barely competent code monkeys desperately trying to produce something that works reliably by a process of trial and error :-) 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. Regards -- Adrian Hey