What metrics would help you identify packages? (Either from a "trust"; perspective or a "usefulness" perspective?)
R users and admins face a discoverability crisis. With more than 12K packages, how can you decide which packages to use and trust? In RStudio Package Manager we're hoping to help new users discover packages by tracking which packages are used:
However, we'd also like to provide metrics for packages that aren't in the organization yet. There has been some interesting work in this space (here, here, and here). We've also got some ideas of our own, adding badges based on a package’s download frequency, the presence of vignettes and tests, and code coverage.
What do you think?