Star/fork counts

[DonaldTsang]

See: https://badgen.net/github/stars/micromatch/micromatch

[cfcs]

@DonaldTsang what is your intention with this link?

[DonaldTsang]

@cfcs have notes/markers that show which repo has a high star or fork count

[cfcs]

Ah, gotcha. :)

A number of our links are not GitHub links, but point to Gitlab instances and websites instead, so we would only get a partial view, but that's probably fine.

I'm not 100% convinced that stars/forks are a useful metric for anything beyond successful advertising.
It seems to me that stars can be interpreted as "someone thought this was interesting," but it doesn't say much about how many actual users there are, or what their background for finding it interesting is. Ranking the projects by number of stars will be putting potentially technically superior tools at a disadvantage compared to -for example- popular authors' part-time pet projects.
A project having many forks could either points towards it being unmaintained, or having a healthy community of contributors.

I think a better metric might be the number of open and merged pull requests (to get a rough idea how open the maintainers are to third-party patches and how much interest there is in contributing to the various projects) -- can that site pull those stats?

I don't really have a strong opinion re: whether or not we should add these graphics, but I would like us to document their utility and what we perceive their value-add to be (EDIT: If we do add them, ofc). Maybe @fd0 has more thoughts?

[DonaldTsang]

@cfcs I generally believe that stars/forks are a basic metric on activity or popularity, and pull requests are a more advanced set of health metrics that can get weird in some edge cases.

[jtagcat]

I think that everyone should be given as much information as possible. Show PRs, show stars, show forks, show last activity, show everything. That way you can make the most informative decision based on your own scenario.

[cfcs]

@jtagcat I would have no issue with someone volunteering to update those numbers every month or so for all the projects we have.

[jtagcat]

This will probably be done automatically by a script or something else. Easy for GitHub, but other platforms I don't know about.