What quality metrics do we need to make packages quality visible?

[gavanderhoorn]

@tyagikunal

@gavanderhoorn

Afferent and efferent coupling at package level is already calculated

The problem (in my opinion) with current method is this is a constant depth graph. As such there might be a case that a package A might be rendered useless because of license incompatibilities caused by it’s dependency on package B. Finding out packages at different levels would be useful and the current list method can be modified to show a graph. A graph also helps to choose the package with minimum proliferation of dependencies in case of two or more similar packages. I do concede that the average ROS user would not be affected by this issue as much a company. (Also, I’ve noted above that this list is what should be displayed, not what wiki is lacking. Current info on wiki isn’t lacking per-se, it’s just spread around a bit)

I was a bit vague in my reply: the data used to render those dependencies on the ROS wiki is available from the buildfarm (stored on the doc host, see indigo/api/fanuc_experimental/manifest.yaml for an example). It’s true that the Package Links box shows only a single level, but following those yaml files to an arbitrary depth is trivial and would enable you to compute recursive dependencies as well.

Note that there are several tools that already do this, but then not based on files on the doc host: the various rospack depends* commands can compute recursive afferent and efferent coupling of packages for you (see the documentation).

@tyagikunal

PS: I don’t think I’ve said this before, but please inform me if I appear confrontational. I find it hard to choose the right sentence structures and … sometimes things go downhill

Don’t worry, I’m Dutch.