Should I use this REPO? Tips and tricks to avoid time losing and buggy code!

If you are a developer you will surely have used code from public repo (you do not reinvent the wheel every time or do you?), and sometimes you would have wanted to give that repo a second gaze because now you find yourself stuck with a bunch of unsupported buggy code.

Since I ran into a similar situation recently I decided I want to turn this annoying loss of time into a learning experience, so...

what do you look first in a repo you are planning to use, and which are the red flags you cannot ignore?

Alessandro Ballerini

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on August 7, 2020

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I look for signals of an actively maintained project with a decent community around it. These are:
- Stars
- Latest commit
- Commit history (frequent merging of PRs or sporadic dependency updates)
- Opened issues/PRs-to-closed issues/PRs ratio
- Contributors graphs (are there more than just one maintainer? (=bus factor))
- Decent documentation and Readme on its usage
Depending on how important the library is, I'm more strict/lenient with requirements. For example, a pub/sub library on top of Redis is critical to the system while a code coverage lib is less important.

Red flags for me are:
- Many opened issues and unmerged PRs
- Issue titles that suggest project is stale: "Can we get an update?", "Is this project still maintained?"
- No recent (regular) commit history
- Repository is archived or marked as deprecated (obvious one 😉)
maximization

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4 years ago
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