Improved discovery on the Dart package site

Back in July we talked about our changes to the Dart package site (http://pub.dartlang.org), which included better support for analyzing…

Michael Thomsen

Sep 24, 2018 · 3 min read

Back in July we talked about our changes to the Dart package site (http://pub.dartlang.org), which included better support for analyzing packages for potential issues. Since then we’ve focused on further improvements to discovering content on the package site.

The vast majority of recent & popular packages have been migrated to support Dart 2, so they are ready for Flutter and AngularDart 5 apps. However some packages — mostly older ones not being maintained — still don’t support Dart 2. To make sure you can easily spot these, we now add Dart 2 incompatibility tags to the overview and package detail pages.

Packages incompatible with Dart 2 are clearly marked ‘Dart 2 incompatible’

Also, we anticipate that we will be archiving/discontinuing these incompatible packages in a future version of the package site, so if you are an author of a package marked ‘Dart 2 incompatible’, please consider migrating it soon!

Dart comes with a rich set of core (standard) libraries. Developers have told us that it can be hard to remember if a particular utility function is in a core library or in a package. To help you find the API you need, searches on pub.dartlang.org now include not just published packages, but also core libraries. Search results from core libraries have sdk in the score circle, and the annotation Dart core library. If you click the entry, you go directly to the library API documentation.

Search hits in SDK core libraries are included among the results

Pub has provided an Atom feed for a while; to make this more discoverable we’ve added a direct link in the site footer.

We’ve made a number of simplifications and adjustments to the scoring model for health and maintenance. For an overview of the current model, please see the pana README (pana is the tool that provides the scoring).

In the future, we plan to improve transparency by showing how much each reported issue reduced the overall score directly on the package analysis page.

Found an issue? Have a cool idea or suggestion? Please tell us by opening an issue in our tracker. Also note that even the package site itself is crafted as open-source in the pub-dartlang-dart repo, and contributions and ideas are most welcome!