Breaking change: Deprecation and discontinuation of standalone Dart tools

[Michael Thomsen]

Background

Historically the Dart team has offered a number of smaller developer tools for things like formatting code (dartfmt), analyzing code (dartanalyzer), etc. In Dart 2.10 (October 2020) we introduced a new unified Dart developer tool, the dart tool.

Intended change

As we discussed at launch in the blog post, we plan to first deprecate and then discontinue the smaller tools in favor of the new combined tool. 

The first tools will be deprecated in the upcoming 2.14 release. For details, please see the breaking change issue:
https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/46100

Rationale

With the new unified tool the existing tools are no longer needed. To reduce maintenance, and ensure we offer a single high-quality toolset the old comments are being removed.

Should you have any issues with missing functionality in the new dart-based tools, please file an issue in the Dart SDK issue tracker.

Migration

To migrate, switch to using the dart tool, and the subcommands listed in the above table.

[Michael Thomsen]

Update: In the Dart 2.15 release the following changes related to this will happen:

1. The pub command is deprecated. You can use dart pub (or flutter pub) instead.
2. The dart2native command is discontinued (removed). Use dart compile.
3. The dartfmt command is discontinued (removed). Use dart format.

We will continue to update the master tracking issue, https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/46100, as we move forward.