Re: Voting system for elections

Well, 'recent commits' is useful only as an imperfect indicator of whether
a project is dead or alive.
It isn't an absolute to use as a checkbox item for evaluating the
appropriateness of a software solution.
Rather it is good to know in case it stops working due to upstream issues
or any variety of factors.
It is part of the 'due diligence' research phase of choosing a software
solution.

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 8:10 AM, Ian Jackson <
ijackson(at)chiark(dot)greenend(dot)org(dot)uk> wrote:

> Susan Spencer writes ("Re: Voting system for elections"):
> > Which STV software has both:
> >
> > 1. open source license
> > 2. recent commits
>
> I think asking for recent commits is not really sensible. In general
> the meme that software is only useable, or only of high quality, if it
> is constantly being modified is harmful. There are many programs I
> use frequently which are hardly ever modified. They provide a
> pleasing level of stability and reliability.
>
> To demonstrate this point, in direct answer to your question:
>
> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~ian/git?p=
> appendix-a6.git;a=blob;f=compute-scottish-stv;h=
> 98ec3082bd92de269a79af720f4ba8472c8f163a;hb=HEAD
>
> I wrote that on Sunday afternoon.
>
> (Commits in that repo since then were simply to enable me to
> mechanically compare its functionality with OpenSTV. I am pleased to
> be able to report that when I used SPI's recent board election as a
> test case, OpenSTV and my own program produced identical results. Ie,
> I did not need to fix any further bugs in either implementation.)
>
> Of course my tool is not really productised or packaged. But that
> just goes to show that `has recent commits' is not the best criterion
> for software quality. https://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openstv.html
> seems to me to show a package in reasonably good shape.
>
> If SPI wants to use STV for future board elections I will happily
> reimplement Scottish STV again in whatever language, and with whatever
> input and output forwards, are thought desirable.
>
> Ian.
>