Initiative to Deprecate Packages

community
1

There are a lot of stale Meteor packages out there now, and with 1.3’s adoption of regular old NPM packages, there’s no need in an up-to-date project for those packages. But they still come up in search engine results, often as the most prominent. They still come up in Atmosphere.

I want to start an initiative to update the README.md files of as many stale Meteor packages as we can find. Simply go find that repository, and make a pull request to change the README.md to say something like this

# [Package Name]
This package/wrapper has been deprecated. You should instead use the native npm package, [https://www.npmjs.com/package/package-name](package-name).
## Uninstall this package
meteor remove [package-name]
## Install npm replacement
meteor npm install [npm-package-name]
## Usage
import {PackageName} from 'package-name';

export class Example extends PackageName{
  ...
}

Questions, comments, concerns, insights, ambiguities, and/or disagreements?

5 Likes
2

That sounds like a great idea! I think it could be great to couple it with a blog post, so that the README can link to a post definitively explaining why that’s a good idea.

Perhaps someone can step up to write a post on http://engineering.meteor.com/ ?

3

Though I have migrated to 1.3.4.1, I am still using several meteor packages in my product by taking advantage of ‘classic’ linking. If I have an issue witha meteor package, I would still look in atmosphere first, and I hope that packages that are there are still supported with enhancements and bugfixes when required.
I understand the need to encourage users to move to npm packages, but ‘deprecated’ may very well cut off support to a lot of current users that may be required to support older versions of Meteor with enhanced versions of the meteor packages they already use.

4

I think maybe a message about the package being deprecated and how it shouldn’t be used in new projects is better than outright removal. I have used a few older packages in a current project that the regular npm wouldn’t work due to changes made to make it work with meteor (medium editor with autoform)

5

You’re in luck - it’s impossible to delete packages from Atmosphere.

I think the question though is whether updates to the wrappers should be published, and I think they should not.