oss-evaluate-repo

Evaluate Repo

Is this repo worth your time? Not every open source project deserves months of contribution effort. This skill evaluates project health, governance, community dynamics, and trajectory — so you invest in repos that will value your work and still exist in a year.

Purpose

Contributing to OSS is an investment. A single meaningful PR takes 10-40 hours including learning the codebase. Before investing that time, you should know: Is this project actively maintained? Is the community healthy? Will your contributions be reviewed? Could the project be abandoned next month? This skill answers those questions with evidence, not vibes.

When to Use

• Deciding whether to invest time in a specific OSS project
• Choosing between multiple repos to contribute to
• Evaluating a project before committing to a GSoC proposal
• NOT for checking if a repo accepts external contributions — oss-find-issue does that
• NOT for evaluating code quality — oss-explore-repo does that
• NOT for repos you're already contributing to — too late, you're invested

Prerequisites

• A repo URL or name to evaluate
• gh CLI authenticated
• Clear goals for why you want to contribute (learning, career, community)

Process

1. Check vital signs

These are binary health checks — if any fail, the repo is likely not worth investing in.

# Basic repo info
gh api repos/{owner}/{repo} --jq '{
  stars: .stargazers_count,
  forks: .forks_count,
  open_issues: .open_issues_count,
  archived: .archived,
  license: .license.spdx_id,
  created: .created_at,
  updated: .pushed_at,
  default_branch: .default_branch
}'

# Recent commit activity
git log --oneline -20 --since="6 months ago" 2>/dev/null || \
  gh api repos/{owner}/{repo}/commits --jq '.[0:10] | .[] | "\(.commit.author.date[:10]) \(.commit.message | split("\n")[0])"'

# Is the repo archived or in maintenance mode?
gh api repos/{owner}/{repo} --jq '.archived'

Kill signals (stop evaluation if any are true):

• Archived or read-only
• No commits in 6+ months
• README says "no longer maintained" or "looking for maintainers"
• License is missing or incompatible with your needs