Finding current & maintained packages

packages
1

Hello Everybody! I am in the process of updating a 5-year-old Meteor project to bring it back online. I have upgraded the Meteor version to 2.2, and now I am working on replacing incompatible dependencies.

What I am finding most challenging and time-consuming is trying to figure out which is the most current and best-maintained package I should be using.

For example, for Flash Messages there are 10-15 options on Atmosphere and none of them appear to have been updated since 2015. For Cloudinary, there are multiple options as well and I could go on.

It’s possible that some of these packages are no longer maintained because there is an equivalent on NPM. So I am confused about whether to look for solutions on Atmosphere or NPM.

Are others experiencing this frustration? Am I missing something, like a well-maintained “best practices” or “maintained packages” document somewhere? I appreciate all feedback.

2

I think this is a problem most of us can relate to. Particularly if your packages use Cordova dependencies. Atmosphere does have a flag system where people can flag non working packages and also a system for “starring” high quality maintained packages though I think that process is manual right now (e.g., submission and manual verification) not totally sure on that tbh

3

If we need something non-meteor-specific, we prioritize the use of npm due to the reasons of having more options and activity.

With meteor-specific, here are normally our options

  • maintained by meteor
  • meteor-community packages
  • maintained by an active member of the community
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4

In Meteor 2.3 (though can be applied already), maintainers can add deprecated: true to package description which will then show a notice when installing or updating such packages. Hopefully we can get a notice about it on Atmosphere soon, though that will still leave unmaintained packages without it.
You might also want to take a look on Packosphere which is community version of Atmosphere, it highlights when a package hasn’t been updated in a while.
https://packosphere.com/

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