[Loose idea - feel free to close at any moment in time] Provide some way to yield a "what's new?" in the gems ecosystem #2758
Description
Yo there ruby folks,
This is a loose idea I had, so it's not a good for an issue request - nonetheless let me explain
this, because perhaps the idea may have some merit in the long run.
Some time ago some entity added that diff-viewer where you can compare two different gems,
in particular seeing what changes were made specifically. This is, overall, I think useful - at
the least new functionality that wasn't available for many people prior to that. Anyway.
I had a very emails that my ruby requirements of 3.x ++ are too severe, so I downgraded
most of the requirements. But afterwards I was wondering ... how to tell the users that
a change was made? I am most definitely never going to write any email because that
seems spammy/obstrusive/annoying. Yet how should they know otherwise? They can check
on their own, yes, but people don't have infinite time ... and people are different anyway.
So I was thinking it would be useful if rubygems itself could provide some sort of notification.
Hopefully in a non-intrusive way ... aka not spammy. Something that could be autogenerated
so that nobody has to invest time manually in that. A bit like discord (which I find spammy, by
default ... :P). Note that I don't suggest discord 1:1 as such; I am just giving this as an example
of news/notifications.
This can include security-related notifications too and use different colours (keep it simple though).
Now you can ask "but what kind of changes are newsworthy?". Good question. I am not necessarily
saying that only "newsworthy" changes are made available but more that ruby users and gem users
have some kind of way to see "trends" and "changes" in general - both in the whole gem ecosystem
(and ideally github too but I understand that this is too much work to focus on outside the
rubygems.org ecosystem), as well as (very important) the gems you are currently using. So, I think
the main idea is to focus on the gems that you use. This could be handled either by people having
an account on rubygems.org, or perhaps as opt-in for gem users (one has to check on this
information not being abused by malicious actors, but I think that's possible; to keep this simple,
perhaps it is easier to only restrict this to those who have an account on rubygems.org by default,
and with a simple toggle option to specifically enable this in the setting before this is then shown).
The view-interface could be added to rubygems.org ... not sure about the API. Perhaps /news or
some additional statistical name. But anyway - these are details. I am more suggesting the idea.
The idea may be useful if you were not quite active in the last 2 months, but now want an update
and ideally want to ask rubygems.org rather than go through twitter and what not. Of course
this all depends on what is "newsworthy", but I suppose people can suggest what would be
interesting for them. For me it may be interesting to see gems that were inactive, become
active again, or drop/change their requirements (if it is easy to see in a page that is ... that
is why I think an overview page like a HTML table or so may be useful in this regard).
Anyway - that's just a loose idea! Feel free to close this thread at any moment in time. Cheers!