On Sunday, February 01, 2015 08:41:54 Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: > On 2/1/15 7:48 AM, Mathias LANG wrote: > > This is arguably the most well-defined goal here, but at the same time, > > it sounds strange to judge the contributions by the numbers of pull > > request. We could top that number -and I'm afraid we'll be tempted to do > > so- by submitting a streamline of pull requests fixing trivial doc > > problems / mispelling (I'm not saying docs P.R. are worthless), or > > implementing trivial functions. > > Yah, Walter is also unconvinced of such metrics. There's anecdotal > evidence the use of simple metrics could go either way, the risk for > abuse being obvious. > > However lack of measurable metrics on account of them being open to > abuse may lead to lack of progress. I've had excellent experience with > good use of metrics and proxies, and I trust our community there's > little motivation to look good by playing the numbers.
I would think that an open source community of volunteers would stand a better chance of avoiding some of the negatives of tracking various metrics, because the monetary compensation, promotion opportunities, etc. that such things can affect in a full-time job are not normally present in an open source project. There are likely other ways that they could lead to bad behavior that would affect us, but in general, I think that the odds that tracking metrics and pushing for their improvement will cause problems are fairly low. Now, they may not help particularly either, but I see no harm in trying. We can always stop if we find that it's causing problems. - Jonathan M Davis