Sharing experience on packages

[Jérôme Collet]

Hi all,

I am new to Julia, I used to use R. And using R packages, the main difficulty for me is the choice of a package for a given task. Most of the time, there are many packages solving the same problem, so we have to choose.

• A first possibility could be the TaskViews, but it is easy to see that around a third of all packages is listed in a TaskView, so being listed does not say anything about quality.
• Thanks to Rstudio, it is possible to know how many times a given package was downloaded. It is an indication about package quality. But this indication is difficult to obtain, and not very reliable.
• I heard that in Matlab, it is easy to know the experience about a package, or even a function of a package, compared to other similar functions in another packages.

So, are there any plans to collect, store and share the experience on packages?

[Stefan Karpinski]

Pkg3, the next generation package manager I'm working on will likely include optional telemetry collection. You'll be asked to opt in or out when you first use it.

[Chris Rackauckas]

For now, stars are the best bad measurement we have.

[Milan Bouchet-Valat]

Le mardi 15 novembre 2016 à 02:02 -0800, Jérôme Collet a écrit :
> Hi all,
>
> I am new to Julia, I used to use R. And using R packages, the main
> difficulty for me is the choice of a package for a given task. Most
> of the time, there are many packages solving the same problem, so we
> have to choose.
> A first possibility could be the TaskViews, but it is easy to see
> that around a third of all packages is listed in a TaskView, so being
> listed does not say anything about quality.

There already exists a similar tool for Julia:
http://svaksha.github.io/Julia.jl/

I guess we could advertize it more.

Regards