Adolfo,
> From a user perspective, I'm mostly interested in these qualities:
> - Good and stable API
> - Well tested
> - Well documented
> - Actively maintained. Not necessarily actively developed.
How do you check for first and second bullet point?

For the fourth one, I have seen quite some ROS packages being
"actively" maintained but often that meant just increasing the version
release number while in reality there were very little bug fixes. And
possibly a very small user base.