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Comment by ghxst | Hacker News Reader

I sort by most amount of stars quite frequently when I am learning a new language and want to know what the most popular package is for something. What do you think would be a better metric for a use case like that?

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Don't count any of my stars then, I thought it was a bookmark feature. Every repo I've starred is only starred to find later, not an endorsement from me.

That's partly what I assume people star repos for, it really doesn't defeat my use case. It's a metric that indicates interest and popularity more so than approval or endorsements.

I think it's a decent metric. I agree with the other comment that actual imports is probably a better metric, but that's not always as trivial to find.

That said, the package repositories for many popular languages list stats of either declared dependencies or package downloads, which helps.

rdeps are completely broken in github. I wrote a library that I have used in other projects of my own and it was always at 0 users.

Anyway if stuff is used by proprietary stuff it will also sit at 0.

I now moved to codeberg where there is less spam, although it does have stars

I wasn't suggesting using GitHub. In fact, I don't think I was aware that GitHub even listed reverse dependencies. Where is that in the UI?

https://github.com/ltworf/typedload/network/dependents

Ah yes. I forgot I actually use this feature in some of my projects. GitHub isn't always able to update this automatically but you can programmatically report dependencies.

Yeah not way to automatically detect "import xxx"

Right. I believe they rely on things like requirements.txt, Cargo.toml, etc. And of course not all languages are supported. So if you use an unsupported language or package manager, you're out of luck.

It doesn't even work with normal requirements.txt by the way. At least not all the time.

number of actual imports in code

Goodheart's law - this would just cause imports in junk repos

CodeRank(tm)!

This might work but biases against languages whose package managers are not used in the rank. As well as code that is used alot but not referenced via code directly e.g. drop in dlls.

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