release history visualization on project page

[brainwane]

Breaking @stared's idea out of #991 (comment), and lightly editing:

When the last update is 3 months ago, there is a big difference if the first update was also 3 months ago (then chances are it is neither mature nor under active development) or 4 years ago (likely that there is some separate dev branch, or that it is so mature that it does not need frequent updates).

Personally (as a big fan of D3.js stuff) I would love to see a "barcode" with stripes, each for a release, with position related to the release date.

I'm also in favor of a sparkline or barcode-style visualization of a project's past releases.

[rixx]

Ok, this sounds really cool. Ideally, would this chart go over a fixed width for every project? Or would we want the same width to represent the same timespan everywhere, yielding a variable width chart? I'm also a bit worried about how to embed this into a project page, and explain it well, without having it stick out too much – if anybody has any mockups for this, that would be really cool.

[brainwane]

@yeraydiazdiaz Any ideas?

[powens]

If ya'll don't mind, I'd like to take this on :)

I hacked together two quick POCs available at: https://codesandbox.io/s/pypi-release-graph-12t7b
I'm not entirely sure what exactly you would be looking for, but I could further refine it

[rixx]

Thank you for the POCs! Having something concrete to talk about is super helpful. I'm not sure aggregating by month is a good idea though – I'm under the impression that most months would be 0 or 1 values for most projects (this is just intuition, if anybody has data on this, that might be helpful). I think the original idea of a timeline where the release dates are marked might be more helpful, then, because yes/no data is a bit easier to parse than a graph.

[powens]

Thanks for your feedback! I think I understand the requirements a bit more, and definitely agree with you that a monthly aggregation wouldn't make sense for most projects. For some reason, I was thinking specifically of some JS projects that release new minor versions several times a week.

I've tweaked the original bar graph to show more of that barcode-style. I added django's release history for 2019 for a more realistic example, and set the bar's width to a static amount (but that could be scaled to something relative to the width of the time scale and width of the graph) - https://codesandbox.io/s/pypi-release-graph-v2-mi6pr

[benjaoming]

Visualizing and making this metric easy to assess is indeed helpful for initial assessments! I also imagine how clicking the graph could point the user towards more resources about "health metrics" of open source software.

While it might not be possible to say anything automatically from the release activity, it gives the user freedom to apply their own assessment. Maybe the package is rock-solid and works well.

So I could imagine a "neutral" visualization to be used in order to promote doing an assessment of the release activity. Not implying "this is bad" or "this is good".

I've tossed in @powens' POC work (barcode version) to get a glimpse of what this might look like:

Any thoughts or reactions?

Some edge cases to think of in the renditions...

• Empty graph: No releases past 12 months (project inactive? or very solid?)
• Full graph: 100 releases past year (project unstable/development?)
• Nice graph: Steady release flow

Idea 1: Decide that the graph always reflects the past 12 months so it's easy for the user to quickly decode what's going on - not for instance to auto-scale it to the previous release.

Idea 2: An empty graph has a greyed out text "(no releases)"

Idea 3: A full graph is accepted as is, since the text above will reveal the actual case, i.e. "Past 12 months: 100 releases".

Idea 4: Barcode lines are filled with an rgba color, so that overlaps can create a visual "burst" - but in a neutral color, not indicating good or bad.