Flutter Deprecation Lifetime
Kate Lovett
tl;dr: Deprecations in the Flutter framework will now have a consistent lifetime of 1 year after stable release, or 4 stable releases - whichever is longer.
Hello everyone,
In the past, we have removed deprecated code from the Flutter framework on an inconsistent basis. This has led to unexpected migration burdens when upgrading Flutter.
We are therefore changing to a new process.
Deprecations in the Flutter framework will now have a fixed lifetime of 1 year after stable release, or 4 stable releases, whichever is longer.
With the arrival of Flutter 1.22, the deprecations that have reached end of life under this policy are listed in this public design document. These deprecations are scheduled to be removed before the next stable release.
As a reminder, we invite everyone to submit their tests to our flutter/tests repository: https://github.com/flutter/tests
If you have an open-source application, plugin, or package using Flutter, and you have automated tests, you can contribute them to the repository above and we will run these tests every time we make a change to Flutter, however minor. (Google is contributing the resources for us to run these tests, there is no cost to you.)
We only consider changes that break a contributed test as being breaking changes, including deprecations. When we do find that we want to break a test, we will work with you to migrate your applications. This includes removing deprecated code from the Flutter framework.
As usual, we publish more detailed information for these breaking changes through migration guides, available at https://flutter.dev/docs/release/breaking-changes.
For more details on the policy we will be following, see our wiki:
https://github.com/flutter/flutter/wiki/Tree-hygiene#handling-breaking-changes
For more details about how to contribute your tests, see this document:
https://github.com/flutter/tests/blob/master/README.md
Thanks,
Kate Lovett