Differentiate between top-level gems and transitive dependencies in report

[shanecav84]

When running libyear-bundler, the report can include gems that are not listed in my Gemfile. Those are the transitive dependencies of the top-level gems actually listed in my Gemfile. Often, the updates to those transitive dependencies are reflected in an update to the gemspec of the associated top-level gem, so an update to a top-level gem could allow bundler to resolve using the updated transitive dependency. It's tedious to try and update each gem listed, when an update to just the top-level gems would suffice. I'd like to see top-level gems listed separately (or hierarchically) so I can focus on updating them first.

[jaredbeck]

I'd like to see top-level gems listed separately (or hierarchically) so I can focus on updating them first.

I also like to update top-level stuff first. Some people probably prefer to update from the "bottom up", and a hierarchical report would help them also.

Displaying a hierarchy is a bit tricky, because it's actually a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) not a tree. We could display a number like "Distance from Gemfile" in the report, where 0 is in the Gemfile, 1 is a direct child, and so on.

Regardless of how it works, this should be off by default, enabled by a CLI flag. We want the default report to be as simple as possible.

However, the focus of this library is measuring freshness, and this feature is getting away from that a bit. We could handle this in a different library, like bunup, or it could be a separate gem
that plugs into libyear-bundler. bunup, for example, could say something like "It looks like you're trying to update actionpack. Would you rather update its parent, rails?"

I think our decision should be based on how much complexity this feature would add.

[shanecav84]

I'll start playing around with a separate library and see what I can come up with.

[jkgraham]

As a hack you can simply add the bundler option --only-explicit to bundle_outdated.rb here. Might submit a PR for that if I can find time.

[shanecav84]

Some similar discussion is here singlebrook/bunup#11. --only-explicit is Bundler 1.17+.

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