Project Ideas Project popularity - aboutcode-org/aboutcode GitHub Wiki

In search of popularity and prominence metric for software packages

Software is consumed as packages in ecosystems such as Maven/Java, RPM, Debian, npm, Rubygems.

Each ecosystem typically offers a centralized package repository though some are fully decentralized (such as Go). Determining the popularity and prominence of a software package within its ecosystem in a somewhat unbiased way is an unresolved issue and goes well beyond just counting stars on GitHub.

The goal of this project is to:

  • Inventory and research existing efforts to provide metric proxies such as and including Libraries.io Sourcerank, Sonatype MTTU, OpenSSF Criticality, and others
  • Inventory and document the metrics and data that could be available in key ecosystems such as Maven/Java, RPM, Debian, npm, Rubygems, PyPI, Conda, R, Perl, Go, Dart, Rust, Swift, Eclipse, Conan and PHP.
  • Propose new metrics directions and a validation process for a possible unified approach (or multiple ecosystem-specific approaches)

The research question is: How to rank open source packages relative prominence and popularity? The project is also to write actual code to compute this popularity and prominence.