[tedivm]

It mostly doesn't matter, because these metadata files are pulled into their respective package managers. When you publish to RubyGems the file is read into their database and made available to their API, just like when you publish a Python file the pyproject.toml is parse into the PyPI database and made available.

This is a major reason why UV is faster than older python package managers, as they were able to take advantage of the change in the PyPI registry that enabled this. Now these package managers can run their dependency calculations without needing to download the entire package, decompress the package files, and then parse them.

[nightpool]

Ah, I had misremembered the article as saying that the API was sufficient for "most" tasks, all it actually says is that it's the "normal" way of getting the dependency info. I was wondering if there was some less common operations (e.g. upgrading?) that needed more info beyond what was in the API.