Caveats around using Libyears

Over the last few years, I've spent time working on projects like dependency-management-data with the intent that I could provide visibility into organisational usage of dependencies and insight into how outdated they are, which continues with working upstream on Renovate and Mend's enterprise offerings. Over the last few years of work, I've spent time looking at some of the great metrics the CHAOSS project work on, where I found the Libyear metric: Libyears gives a more tangible definition of "dependency freshness", and a more meaningful description of how outdated your dependencies are. At face value, Libyear is a really useful metric to discuss, but comes with a few caveats to be aware of. Renovate exposes information about Libyear calculations, but each time I end up discussing Libyears with someone, I end up sharing these caveats. Before finally writing official documentation about Libyears and the caveats, I wanted to flesh out my ideas on my blog, first. Breaking changes One…