[Starlingx-discuss] opendev statistics

[Xie, Cindy]

Thanks Jeremy for the detail explanation!!

Cindy Xie
IAGS


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> 
Sent: Saturday, October 19, 2019 8:34 AM
To: starlingx-discuss at lists.starlingx.io
Subject: Re: [Starlingx-discuss] opendev statistics

On 2019-10-19 00:08:04 +0000 (+0000), Xie, Cindy wrote:
> Normally github watches & stars are used to measure how the project is 
> fitting the community interest. For myself, when somebody recommend an 
> OSS project to me, I will go to github and see how popular it is, and 
> there are what I am looking for.

Usually I'm looking to see what Linux distributions are actively packaging the software, how readily its maintainers respond to defect reports, whether and where its security advisories are published, how often it produces releases, or similar quality and health indicators. I've never observed a correlation between GitHub watches/stars and software viability. Usually the only time I see them mentioned are in press releases or conference talks when someone is attempting to dupe an unwitting audience with seemingly-relevant statistics they don't understand. There's also apparently a thriving market for buying GitHub stars, watchers, forks and followers (just for amusement, the first hit from a quick Web search turns up a service who is willing to sell me stars in bulk at a going rate of us$0.70 each).

That aside, the watches and stars on GitHub are social networking constructs which tend to only accrue with the network effect of a large social platform. OpenDev doesn't have much in the way of competing projects you're going to compare "likes" on to determine which one is the most popular, nor would comparing such values against those on another platform like GitHub be meaningful at all since they'd need to be scaled by the relative user-bases of each.

> The feature you described below to me, not sure how often people are 
> using them, but as it's not explicitly visible to observers, it is 
> difficult to use judge the community fit I think.

Correct, they are specifically for streamlining code review workflows, and the only people who are even likely to have accounts to be able to set them are people uploading patches and reviewing changes in OpenDev's Gerrit code review system. I wouldn't expect them to indicate anything aside from maybe habits of the developer and reviewer demographics of a project.
--
Jeremy Stanley