Removed gems and rubydoc.info syncing

[rubyFeedback]

Hey there Loren and everyone else,

Some time ago I removed my gems from rubygems.org, due to a disagreement with the rubygems.org team in regards to the "after 30 days you can no longer remove your own gems anymore" ad-hoc restriction. I can not accept that my own gems are being recorded in a state where there may be bugs, then people may write me an email complaining about these but I can not remove these outdated gems anymore due to the owners of rubygems.org suddenly disallowing that, without any discussion about it whatsoever; or I'd have to update all gems for a new version, while the old version is still there, without me being able to control any of that old code. Anyway, this is just the introduction - the issue here is about something else.

One such gem that I removed was bioroebe and the old docs here show this:

https://www.rubydoc.info/gems/bioroebe

So, I have no big problem with outdated docs, but I think people may expect that the gem is still existing even when it is not. So they can read the old docu - that is fine - but can not do a "gem install bioroebe" anymore. (I plan to host all my gems on github eventually, thus also bypassing rubygems.org strange ad-hoc restriction, where I am in control of my own code, rather than rubygems.org controlling how I handle old, outdated code, but right now I can not do so as reallife keeps me quite busy, at the least at the moment.)

I have two suggestions in this regard:

1. Indicate somewhere on rubydoc.info that a gem's documentation no longer has a corresponding gem.

This can be e. g. updated once per month or so, that is fine. That indicator could be a small red symbol or so, some small visual cue that also has a help-text such as "This gem is not available on rubygems.org" or anything like that. That way people instantly know whether the docu may be outdated or not, whether a gem still exists or not etc...

2. I would also suggest that after a grace period, the old documentation is removed. You do not necessarily have to delete it, it could be simply automatically moved to some old directory instead. I suggest this can be done after 6 months or 12 months or so. Now, it can be reasoned that old documentation is useful even IF a gem is removed - that may be true. But, if a gem is truly gone, how does possibly outdated documentation still help? And as I suggested, this can still exist in some old directory and people could go there and search for outdated gems' documentation, if that is still necessary, but I would reason that after some time (no matter if 6 months, 12 months or longer), outdated documentation will no longer be that useful.