There is a recurring theme that comes up during my work with different teams (I'm "consulting"). And I have a feeling that ruby-toolbox probably indirectly contributes to this theme and I'm wondering if we can do something about it.

So here is an issue

• I'm offering some low-magic gem with a small footprint (not much code, nut much dependencies), that solves exactly what is requested. I can easily glance through code myself. I'm pretty sure it's very unlikely to disrupt our rails update. Or I can take over this even if it's unmaintained.
• But team asks me: Last commit was 4 years ago... Let's pick something else?

First gem that I heard this argument pop-up was searchlight, it almost got rejected by a team. It was actually adopted and for a couple of years, it was successfully used without much changes.

It's somehow expected that gem should always have a steady stream of contributions.

And I think this is not a healthy expectation from open-source. I've been playing around with Clojure/ClojureScript and noticed that a lot of libraries have remarks about it's "completness"

"this library is complete. it works, there is no needed to fix anything"

so @nathanl notes in searchlight gem as well.

I consider searchlight "done". It has no dependencies, so there's no reason it shouldn't work indefinitely.

Searchlight looks scary on ruby-toolbox page, a lot of red colors. like REALLY RED.
https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/projects/searchlight

But downloads are growing steadily. It's clearly being actively used.

My question here is the following

Since a lot of prominent open source contributors burned out, moved away. Should we better represent 'finished' gems on ruby-toolbox? To create a bit healthier expectations of open-source?