[csw-maintainers] Assessing catalog quality

[Maciej Bliziński]

Hello fellow maintainers,

Phil has recently mentioned[1] the issue of organization-wide quality.
 I believe it is a very important one.

It would be beneficial for our project to come up with a way to track
the quality of our catalog.  We could see trends and react when
something bad is happening, and also see when the catalog is
improving.  We could come up with a set of metrics that would be
periodically applied and recorded.  With time, we would accumulate
information about which direction is our catalog heading.

We already have one metric, implemented by William: package count[2].
It is already a useful metric, allowing us to see how the catalog
grows in the number of packages.  It isn't a quality metric, though.
Quality metrics will require some consideration, and we need to
acknowledge that there will be no perfect metric to measure catalog
quality.  However, an imperfect metric is definitely better than no
metric.

Here's my question to maintainers: What metrics would you apply to the
catalog for the purpose of catalog quality evaluation?  Which aspects
of packages, or interactions between packages would you take into
consideration?  Do you have any already working code that could be
used for this purpose?

Maciej

[1] http://lists.opencsw.org/pipermail/maintainers/2011-June/014860.html
[2] http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/package-statistics/