Suggestion: Indicate the last update date in search results

[deanc]

Earlier today I was looking for a package to put colours on CLI output, and there were numerous packages. I had to click through each of them to see when they were last updated only to find the majority hadn't been updated in a while:
https://packagist.org/?query=colors

Generally I like to use packages which are kept up to date, and it's just as important to me that this is the case as how many stars or downloads the project has.

Therefore I propose the following:

• Indicate the last release date of a package on the search results.
• If a package has not been updated in the last 6 months, perhaps don't display it as prominently or have some visual indication to distinguish recently updated vs not recently updated.
• Add a search filter to remove search results for packages that have not been updated in the last 6 months.

[Seldaek]

I'm not so sure about this.. some things are very stable and rarely updated and that's completely fine, so I would definitely not want to auto-hide things, and I kinda disagree it should be a prominent metric.

[deanc]

Thanks for feedback. I don't have metrics but a lot of packages depend on others. Security issues occur and then if the maintainer doesn't update the dependency it's rotten. This is why I think this metric is important. I'm not so much bothered about how active the project is - although I do think that's important, but surely if it's not had any activity in 6 months you'd agree it might not be the best idea to use?

My suggest doesn't involve hiding anything automatically. But I would like to opt-in to filter out these things. (point 3). NPM does display the last activity: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=debug