Re: [Chicken-hackers] [Chicken-meisters] Let's have a roadmap, just like the grown-ups

[John Gabriele]

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 7:09 AM, Alaric Snell-Pym
<address@hidden> wrote:
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> On 09/08/2011 11:59 AM, Felix wrote:
>
>>
>> Perhaps a bit of ranking? So eggs that are used a lot or that people
>> prefer to use are clearly distinguishable from the weird, broken,
>> useless or obsolete.
>
> A few ideas here:
>
> {...}
>
> 4) Just plain user rankings with a little vote button

Python did this with their central module repository. They added the
feature, but then later removed it. The reasons, as I recall, were
mostly:

1. It was hardly getting any use, and
2. There were arguments over what the ratings actually meant, their
usefulness, and their validity.

Perl 5 has a separate ratings site http://cpanratings.perl.org/ ,
which is quite valuable to the community -- not so much for the rating
numbers themselves, IMO, but for the thoughtful comments people add
about a given module. It's often useful to use when choosing between
multiple similar modules.

(As an aside, Perl also has a separate automatable "rating" mechanism
which computes a given module's "kwalitee". This is a module that
examines a module and looks for signs of possible quality: for
example, Is there a readme? Is there documentation? Are there tests?
etc.  See http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Test::Kwalitee and
http://cpants.perl.org/kwalitee.html for more info. Dunno whether or
not something like this would be useful for checking eggs with.)

---John