Show exact timestamps on https://crates.io/crates/crate-name-here/versions

[peter-lyons-kehl]

Problem space:

• some crate authors/maintainers are too busy/lacking help/reviewers/maintainers to maintain CHANGELOG.md or equivalent per crate. This is more likely for mono repo-based crates with multiple (internal-like, or initially-internal-only-but-later-turned-public) crates together in one GIT/source control repo. Like Changelog **per each crate**, or equivalent BurntSushi/ripgrep#3478.
• https://crates.io/crates/crate-name-here/versions doesn't show timestamp(s), but it shows "ABOUT 1 HOUR AGO", "16 DAYS AGO", "9 MONTHS AGO"...
  • there well may be multiple versions in the same bucket ("9 MONTHS AGO": https://crates.io/crates/ignore/versions)
  • while this sounds sweet, it's unnecessary: The audience is very well capable to round up like this in their head. But the audience is not capable of getting the exact timestamp out of thin air.
  • I do see Crates.io should output dates with timezone info in JSON #1123 and Use timestamps with timezones #10604. But, please
    • don't tell me to remember and invoke the API of human-parse JSON for this - doing so is much more effort than the above rounding up.
    • don't tell me to inspect JSON like https://docs.rs/crate/serde_json/latest/source/.cargo_vcs_info.json, because
      • it's a pain to remember or to find out, and a pain to human-parse, and
      • repository field in Cargo.toml is optional
      • GIT repos get force-pushed to, or removed & replaced etc. - the GIT commit may not exist anymore.
• Of course, there will be opposition to any timestamp format you choose. But opposition from whom, and who's the audience here?? People other than software engineers/developers, and general public in North America don't like YYYY-MM-DD in UTC - but the rest (that is: us, the actual target audience) expects, or understands, that. Surely managers and general public don't inspect a crate's versions - they have us do it.

Quoting @RalfJung from #1592 > comment (and see a follow up comment, too):

...to figure out (or at least get a good clue) which commit of the upstream git repo a crate version is based on. It is quite frustrating to know that this data exists, but struggling to find it each time since it is hidden so well.

[malaire]

You do get exact timestamp as tooltip when you hover cursor over "9 months ago" etc. (but unfortunately in "July 18th, 2026" format).