Count the number of usages in open-source projects

[krzema12]

One of the metrics on how a given library is "good" (adopted, known, stable - many other detailed features ) is the number of projects that depend on it. E. g. GitHub provides it for npm packages, probably because it's easy to parse this information from package.json. For Maven it's doable as well, but with Gradle it starts to be tricky. Anyway, IMO it's a problem worth tackling.

[mpetuska]

Hmm, might be hard to do without scanning the entirety of GitHub as well. The only doable thing I could think of is using existing mavenCentral scan and at least count how many other libraries depend on each particular artefact there.

Do you have any other ideas on how this could be achieved?

[krzema12]

I thought about GitHub search API: https://fusebit.io/blog/github-search-api/?utm_source=www.google.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=none I haven't used it, though, so it's just a quick idea.

[mpetuska]

Just read through that link and I didn't see any mention of direct search of repo dependants. Are you aware of any? Also gh dependencies mapping for gradle is still quite bad.

[krzema12]

I meant naively searching for strings like groupId:artifactId. I know there's a bunch of edge cases (the variant with named arguments, it can be formatted differently, and so on), but just wanted to share the general idea.

[mpetuska]

Ah, makes sense. Doesn't sound too different from what kamp already does with maven central. API limiters might be a blocker though.