One of the challenges in the Jupyter ecosystem is signaling to people in the community which projects are actively being worked on, which are new and changing rapidly, which are stable, which are dormant, etc. This helps guide people in deciding what tools to adopt and contribute to.
The tidyverse has an interesting way of dealing with this problem, providing a set of badges that follow this specification:
What do people think about adopting something like this for the Jupyter repositories? Perhaps it doesn’t need to be mandated across all repositories, but for some (especially the more dormant ones) it could be a good way to provide more information to users.
I was about object to the “questioning” state as a confusing name, but it looks like the tidyverse folks question its usefulness as well. I the idea of at least using experimental and stable, since GitHub already has an archive feature.
Yeah I agree with you that some of them are more useful than others (and some are confusing). I think in particular I like the concepts of “this is an experimental repo”, “this is a growing and quickly-changing repo”, “this is a relatively stable repo”, and “this is a repo we aren’t giving much attention to”
What is the difference between “experimental” and “growing and quickly-changing repo”? As a end user the result is (I think) the same: buckle up and come along for a wild ride kiddo! At least that is how I read them
I like the idea of making a purposeful statement about the state of the repo. I think having a sentence at the start of the README that represents the intention of the badge would be nicer than a badge. Most users won’t know what the badge’s label means and would end up having to click on it to get an explanation or miss it because the README already has five badges. Which is why having a sentence in addition to the badge (till the badge is a wide spread symbol and people expect to see a badge for this) is what I’d do.
IMO the difference is that “experimental” means “I make no promises about the existence or functionality of this repo in the future” while “growing and quickly-changing” means “we think this is a cool idea and are putting resources into making it happen, but will move faster than a stability-minded person would be comfortable with”
re: badges vs. just using words, I think having something standardized, easy to notice, easy to understand, and easy to copy / implement in other repos is the most important thing.
I agree with all of that and I think for the introductory phase we’d do better on the “understanding” part by having a standard sentence that gives people a hint that there is a badge and what the badge means. Having this during the intro phase is like us spending several paragraphs in our contributing docs explaining how to fork, branch, clone and then make a PR. It is second nature to some people but the vast majority of readers have never done it.
. Standardizing these kreduces cognitive load for authors and users.