I've seen lots of metrics to decide if an open source project is alive: age of bugs, number of pull requests open, number of commits in a time period.
When choosing libraries, I've realised I only look at the last commit time. That's sufficient activity IME.
miniblog.
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It feels like a mature software project is one where bugs require multiple commits to fix.
You've hammered out the basic issues, so the remaining issues are often weird interactions between components.
I've dabbled with 'conventional commits' for a personal project but I found they slowed me down.
It's not always easy to categorise a commit as a fix, a chore etc. Sometimes refactorings also fix bugs.
Do you use them? I can imagine a large, mature project benefitting more.
Getting basic language infrastructure going is surprisingly labour intensive.
I've built a toy language up to hello world -- lexing, parsing, evaluating and minimal REPL. I'm already at over 100 commits and 900LOC of Rust (source: https://github.com/Wilfred/garden/tree/6b0ecf775b45047d927f00e0469e178b72c929f2).
