At the beginning of November Adam Johnson tweeted

I’ve come up with a test that we can use to decide whether a new package we’re considering depending on is well-maintained.

and linked to an article he wrote.

He came up (with the help of Twitter) twelve questions to ask of any library that you're looking at:

  1. Is it described as “production ready”?
  2. Is there sufficient documentation?
  3. Is there a changelog?
  4. Is someone responding to bug reports?
  5. Are there sufficient tests?
  6. Are the tests running with the latest <Language> version?
  7. Are the tests running with the latest <Integration> version?
  8. Is there a Continuous Integration (CI) configuration?
  9. Is the CI passing?
  10. Does it seem relatively well used?
  11. Has there been a commit in the last year?
  12. Has there been a release in the last year?

I thought it would be interesting to turn that checklist into a Click App using Simon Willison's Click App Cookiecutter.

I set out in earnest to do just that on November 8th.

What started out as just a simple Click app, quickly turned in a pretty robust CLI using Will McGugan's Rich library.

I started by using the GitHub API to try and answer the questions, but quickly found that it couldn't answer them all. Then I cam across the PyPI API which helped to answer almost all of them programatically.

There's still a bit of work to do to get it where I want it to, but it's pretty sweet that I can now run a simple command and review the output to see if the package is well maintained.

You can even try it on the package I wrote!

the-well-maintained-test https://github.com/ryancheley/the-well-maintained-test

Which will return (as of this writing) the output below:

1. Is it described as 'production ready'?
        The project is set to Development Status Beta
2. Is there sufficient documentation?
        Documentation can be found at
https://github.com/ryancheley/the-well-maintained-test/blob/main/README.md
3. Is there a changelog?
        Yes
4. Is someone responding to bug reports?
        The maintainer took 0 days to respond to the bug report
        It has been 2 days since a comment was made on the bug.
5. Are there sufficient tests? [y/n]: y
        Yes
6. Are the tests running with the latest Language version?
        The project supports the following programming languages
                - Python 3.7
                - Python 3.8
                - Python 3.9
                - Python 3.10

7. Are the tests running with the latest Integration version?
        This project has no associated frameworks
8. Is there a Continuous Integration (CI) configuration?
        There are 2 workflows
         - Publish Python Package
         - Test

9. Is the CI passing?
        Yes
10.  Does it seem relatively well used?
        The project has the following statistics:
        - Watchers: 0
        - Forks: 0
        - Open Issues: 1
        - Subscribers: 1
11.  Has there been a commit in the last year?
        Yes. The last commit was on 11-20-2021 which was 2 days ago
12. Has there been a release in the last year?
        Yes. The last commit was on 11-20-2021 which was 2 days ago

There is still one question that I haven't been able to answer programmatically with an API and that is:

Are there sufficient tests?

When that question comes up, you're prompted in the terminal to answer either y/n.

But, it does leave room for a fix by someone else!

tags: Python, python package