• @[email protected]
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    167 months ago

    I am not a programmer. But I have been using github as an end user for years, downloading programs I like and whatnot. Today I realized there are stars on github. Literally never even noticed.

    • @[email protected]
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      67 months ago

      The stars are more important when you’re a developer. It indicates interest in the project, and when it’s a library you might want to use that translates into how well maintained it might be and what level of official and unofficial support you might get from it.

      Other key things to look at are how often are they doing releases and committing changes, how long bugs are left open, if pull requests sit there forever without being merged in etc.

        • @[email protected]
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          17 months ago

          Closed PRs and Closed issues?

          What if it’s a side project with 1 star, 0 issues (because no one made any) and no PRs because no ones done work on it?

          • @[email protected]
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            17 months ago

            Initially, the stats will reflect amount of marketing effort put into the project.

            The marketing will attract both users and a flow of issues and PRs.

            I’ve done zero marketing for my packages. And it shows ;-)

          • @[email protected]
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            17 months ago

            More so if spme software had dozens or hundreds of open issues/PRs for months that never get looked at I’ll look elsewhere

            Don’t want unstable dependencies