better-bundler-stats.markdown

Hi Andre,

If you recall, we've met a few times. I believe we bumped into each other at RubyConf this past year but were hanging out at the same table in the quieter room at Ales in 2013.

I'm reaching out to you because I have an OSS project that I'd like to build. It's heavily dependent upon Bundler. I wouldn't be troubling you but, after speaking with Larry Marburger at length, it sounds like bundler is in for some big changes in the near future that may throw a wrench in this idea.

Let me get to the point.

Abstract

Rubygems.org currently shows downloads per rubygem version. But, perhaps with some small tweaks to bundler and rubygems, we could reveal so much more information.

What if we could track which rubygems were downloaded with which other rubygems? And if we tracked which gems were downloaded only as dependencies of other gems?

Correlating gem downloads

http://ruby-toolbox.com has been successful at helping developers find gems that perform common functions. But we could go a step beyond that. By starting with a particular gem, and correlating other gem downloads, it becomes possible to infer a stack gems useful to build particular kinds of apps.

Tracking gem dependencies

As a gem developer, I want to know which gems have dependencies on my gem. As a gem developer, I want to know what percentage of my gem downloads are specifically requested in a Gemfile (rather thn as a dependency).

Infrastructure

I don't want to make more work for the bundler or rubygems teams nor do I want to make hosting of bundler or rubygems more complicated. Instead, I propose this as a separate service that may tie into one or both of these services. I'm sure that I could get my current employer (Rackspace) to host such a service.

Going forward

What are the bundler core team's plans for bundler going forward? Is bundler-api going to be sunset anytime soon? Larry had indicated that this was a possibility… and that the architecture you all are considering would make this idea more complicated.

Thanks for wading through this. I hope you can shed some light on where you all are going. Not only would I love to help (really) but I'd like to find a way to provide Ruby developers with more statistical information about the ecosystem.

Evan