[Haskell-cafe] RE: Definition of the Haskell standard library

[Chaddaï Fouché]

2007/9/2, Adrian Hey <ahey at iee.org>:
> 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