NOTICE: Ending support for this gem

[flavorjones]

Ahoy, Rubyists.

This issue, related to #80 (and through that, to #78 and #79), intends to:

1. Give public notice of ending support for chromedriver-helper, and deprecating it in favor of the webdrivers gem which has very nearly a superset of the functionality.
2. Provide a punch list to track what needs to be done to wind down this gem responsibly, and provide transparency into the state of support/deprecation.

More to follow.

[flavorjones]

Rationale

1. I have not coded in Rails or used chromedriver in quite some time, and so I'm pretty far from the day-to-day needs of most users of chromedriver-helper. To be honest, there are some design decisions that need to be made, and work that needs to be done; and I don't have the well-formed opinions or the motivation that a daily user of the gem might have.
2. The webdrivers gem is well-maintained, is very nearly a superset of the functionality of this gem (and supports all major webdrivers), and further has maintainers interested in providing what little this gem does that's not already provided.
3. There's value to the community in having one well-supported and well-maintained gem that handles a given concern; and IMHO there is little-to-nothing to innovate on in this space.

[flavorjones]

Punchlist

Things I think need to be done in order to complete deprecation, ideally by 2019-03-31:

• send an announcement email to ruby-talk@
• notify maintainers of the webdrivers gem (/cc @titusfortner)
• notify rails-core contributors, as it's the largest reverse-dependency on this gem in the form of generate rails new projects
• update the README, CHANGELOG, and other project metadata
• release a patch version (likely v2.1.1) of the gem with a post-install message indicating that the gem is deprecated and out of support, and pointing users to webdrivers
• archive the git repository
• turn off CI at https://ci.nokogiri.org/teams/flavorjones/pipelines/chromedriver-helper and https://ci.nokogiri.org/teams/flavorjones/pipelines/chromedriver-helper-pr
• celebrate the gem's success and relax with a beer

[flavorjones]

/cc @tenderlove for formal notification of rails-core contributors

[flavorjones]

ruby-talk notification is at http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/440018

[flavorjones]

v2.1.1 has been shipped with a post-install-message deprecation notice, and updated gemspec summary and description. Post-install message is:

  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
  |                                                                    |
  |  NOTICE: chromedriver-helper is deprecated after 2019-03-31.       |
  |                                                                    |
  |  Please update to use the 'webdrivers' gem instead.                |
  |  See https://github.com/flavorjones/chromedriver-helper/issues/83  |
  |                                                                    |
  +--------------------------------------------------------------------+

[connorshea]

@flavorjones you should include a message in the Changelog as well.

[guilleiguaran]

Changed in Rails, new Rails 6.0.0 apps will ship webdrivers instead of chromedriver-helper

[pixeltrix]

@guilleiguaran should we also backport that to 5-2-stable as well?

[nodanaonlyzuul]

Thanks @flavorjones (and everyone else who has contributed) - enjoy that well earned, final punch-list item.

[ioquatix]

Thanks for being an awesome maintainer.