Having used node steadily for the past six months, one of the biggest problems I have is finding quality packages. It's easy to simply find packages for a particular task, but determining which are well written, performant, and carefully maintained is not straightforward. And somewhat related, as a developer of several open source packages I'm often left wondering if anyone is actually using them. How do I decide which packages to spend time on without knowing which are most used, if at all? I realize I can look to see what is most depended upon at search.npmjs.org but that's only a partial picture. Packages that are more likely to be leveraged in end-user applications are underrepresented, if they even appear there at all.
Would there be any community interest in developing a basic package usage tracking capability? Maybe something like a simple package/file that can be included in a package to count each time the package is installed or required and report the results back to a central website on some interval. Such a basic capability would be incredibly valuable to developers and users. Users can then quickly determine which packages are well used/tested and developers get to see which of their projects are actually being used. I can imagine a whole host of other useful capabilities like collecting metrics on API usage for help in understanding the potential impact of an API change, but all of it would be secondary to a basic usage counting ability. I'm sure there will be privacy concerns, but I think we can work to address them if there's enough interest in such a capability. I'm more than willing to have those discussions and work on a solution if people think it's worthwhile. -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
