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What's the most important factor to determine quality of an OSS Project ?

Truong Hoang Dung on September 07, 2018

When i look at a github project, i consider the number of closed Pull Requests to know if it's qualified or not for me to use or try it.

What about yours ?

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shanalikhan profile image
Shan Khan

There are different factors, some of them are:

  1. It should have more feature request opened.
  2. Contributors should be active, it's not important there is daily commit but history will provide enough information that its active.
  3. Github stars will help you also to know about the popularity of the project.
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revskill10 profile image
Truong Hoang Dung
  • I agree number of stars will encourage more contributors to join the projects, so it's really an effective factor to qualify a project.

  • Pull Request is only helpful if there's actually communication and colloborator to help that feature landed effectively on time, because in many cases, the implementer really needs helps from the community.

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tux0r profile image
tux0r • Edited

It has no open bug reports and still more than one user.

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revskill10 profile image
Truong Hoang Dung

But you could eventually try it and contribute back to make it greater ?

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tux0r profile image
tux0r

I could and sometimes I do.

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idoshamun profile image
Ido Shamun

I usually go with stars and latest commits, if I am in doubt I check also the issues activity (when a issue was opened, resolved, etc)

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revskill10 profile image
Truong Hoang Dung

Thanks. Could you explain more why you consider those as the most important factors ?

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idoshamun profile image
Ido Shamun
  • Stars show the popularity of this repository in the community.
  • Latest commit show how active the contributors and members, sometimes I check the commits of other branches like dev because not always master is the main branch.
  • Issues show how active the community is

That's about it I think

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revskill10 profile image
Truong Hoang Dung

Too much issues also mean the instability of the project ?
Of course i prefer too much issues than having no issues at all. It just means that the project demand is high !

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idoshamun profile image
Ido Shamun

It means that demand is high as you say, I wouldn't say instability.
Take React as an example there are 276 opened issues there...

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revskill10 profile image
Truong Hoang Dung • Edited

Sure. Some maintainers are just lazy enough to close useless and out-of-date issues ;)