Best way to let users know that your Github fork is no longer maintained (ie. it's been merged)?

Question

Three months ago I forked a github repository for a rubygem and added some features. A fair number of people configured their Rails app to load that gem from my github repository. Yesterday the author merged my work and released a new gem.

I would like to notify people who are continuing to pull from my github repo that they should switch back to the main gem.

I tried adding a 'post_install_message' to my version of the gemspec, but bundler apparently won't use that for gems loaded from paths or github.

I could modify the code to print a warning to the log file, but that feels messy.

I could just update the README, but that assumes people would actually read it on github.com.

Wondering if there is a good/standard/preferred method for this sort of thing?

EDIT: Well, this bugged me enough I submitted a pull request to add this functionality to bundler for gems included via :git or :path. We'll see what happens :)

UPDATE: Yay! https://github.com/bundler/bundler/commit/f876162b3d067ba5a3522b60e75cf13a19124f9c

Answer 1

Update the README

Isn't that what it is there for?

In the commit message, have the summary line summarise that fact, and then write whatever detailed message you would like to convey there as well.

Programmatically, you can write a Deprecated mechanism that warns that this project is no longer being maintained. And where to go.