[Proposal] Maintaining the dio package / 维护 dio package

[cfug-dev]

Summary

The repo's ownership has been transferred to CFUG on 13th Feb 2023, all targets with diox have been migrated to dio. The proposal will be kept for a record as a part of the ecosystem history.

dio is one of the most popular packages in Dart / Flutter's ecosystem; it has had many contributors since 2018. The key fact is, this project is usually outdated and lacks maintenance, even though it added a couple of maintainers after #1234. In order to keep it maintained, we decided to start a fork of the package as "diox" and bring it back to life.

Who we are

We are members from CFUG, maintainers of localization projects in China including flutter.cn and dart.cn. Our members include Flutter GDE, developers that actively contribute to Flutter communities, and engineers who use Flutter in their work.

Background

Supply Chain Security Concerns are becoming increasingly prominent, we need to work together to build a safer Dart / Flutter ecosystem. These top libraries, which are usually used in many Apps, should have this awareness even more.

Unfortunately, we didn’t see it meet the developers’ expectations in this project. The organization (so-called FlutterChina) claims they will continually pursue "providing valuable resources", which we didn’t think the current state of maintenance as it is now is achieving what the slogan is intended to achieve --there are several issues related to outdated codes, lacking maintenance, etc.

To build a safe, active Dart / Flutter ecosystem, after careful consideration and long-term discussions, we decided to “hard fork” the existing dio package to "diox".

Commitment

• In the next 6 months, we'll triage issues if they contain essential information or reproducible steps. If issues are critical, users can provide statistics to prove their importance to help issues get prioritized ASAP.
• Actively adapt new Flutter versions.
• Follow the lints package of linter rules requirement.

Contributions

Open-source projects are full of challenges, this is a common sense of open-source contributors and people who benefit from open-source projects. In addition, the maintenance of open source is not easy. We understand that the organizer and collaborators won't always be actively involved with projects, but keeping projects transparent to the community, allowing developers to participate, and letting collaborators have more permissions would be a better way.

The overall contribution rules of the project are:

• For contributions, fixes, and improvements are generally welcomed if they're well-tested, new features should provide more details to allow maintainers to understand the proposal as quickly as possible. Generally, technical support is not provided for issues and PRs.
• For people who want to be collaborators, the scores are by calculating helpful issue comments, PR reviews, and merged PRs count for the "contribution rates", any contributions that match the rates can post a thread in the discussions to nominate as a collaborator, and will be promoted once half of the original collaborator is approved.

Credits

We appreciate all the contributions made by the initiators and maintainers of dio in the past and hope that the new project will have more supporters and contributors. Thank you for the help and participation of every community member!

We have completed part of the work on this proposal, as well as launched the first release v5.0.0-dev.1.

Please respond with 👍 if you think it's a great proposal, or are willing to support us, please let us know if you have any suggestions in the comment.

(The English version is translated by the Chinese version.)

综述

dio 是一个在 Flutter 生态中非常流行的网络请求库，自 18 年初开源发布并持续有来自全球的开发者参与贡献。我们发现，这个项目并不是持续地在维护，一些关键问题的 Issue 和 PR 已经许久没有得到响应。因此，这个提案的目标是通过创建 diox（以 dio 为基础代码的分叉版本）来替代 dio。

我们是谁

我们是 CFUG 社区的成员，是 Flutter.cn 和 Dart.cn 文档本地化的发起人和主要维护者，成员们包括谷歌官方认可的 Flutter GDE、活跃在 Flutter 各个社区的开发者、在公司工作中使用 Flutter 的工程师们等。

背景

供应链安全问题日益凸显，我们需要共同努力构建一个更安全的 Flutter 生态，其中一个重要议题是第三方库的维护和更新。很显然，对待 dio 这样一个相当基础并且流行的库，作为使用者，我们应该对它的维护提出更高的期望。

较为可惜的是，我们没有从 dio 项目中看到期望中该有的样子，其组织所宣称的始终坚持“提供有价值的资源”也鲜有做到，包括之前有社区成员们反馈的文档内容过期等问题，此处不再一一列举。

为了整个 Flutter 社区的活跃和生态系统的安全，我们正式提出 diox 这个项目提案，diox 是一个 Dart HTTP 请求库，是以 dio 为基础代码的分叉版本。

承诺

• 6 个月内，对 dio 中严重的 bug 承诺进行修复，你也可以直接在我们的 repo 里发 issue 提出 dio 的 bug
• 在 Issue 中完整提供信息和复现步骤等，并使用客观数据说明影响程度，我们承诺尽快分类并解决
• 新功能开发: 积极适配和测试最新 Flutter 版本、积极探索关于 http 新特性的实现并响应使用者的需求
• 相较于新功能开发，我们倾向于保证这个库会被持续积极维护
• 遵守 Dart lint package 要求

社区参与

开源项目的维护充满了挑战，这是每一位贡献过开源项目或从开源项目中受益的开发者们的共识，并且，开源社区的治理并非易事，我们非常理解项目的发起方并非能在每个阶段都保持积极参与，但相对来说，保持对社区透明、广泛吸收开发者参与以及下放部分管理权是一个相对较为妥当的组织方式。

我们计划根据 Issue 分类的数量、PR 合并的比例和 PR review 的数量计算贡献度，任何达到贡献度的贡献者均可发 Discussion 帖提名或被提名成为 diox repo 管理员和 package 管理员，过半现有维护者同意即可添加为管理员。

致敬

我们对过去阶段 dio 的发起人和维护者所做出的所有贡献表示认可和赞赏，也希望新的库能够有更多的支持者和贡献者，谢谢每一位社区成员的帮助和参与！

以上是我们这个提案的全部内容，英文内容从中文翻译而来，如果有任何出入，以中文版为主，针对这个提案，我们已经完成了 一部分工作，同时也发布了第一个版本: v5.0.0-dev.1。

如果你支持这个提案，请使用 👍 来回应。如果你有任何其他建议，也欢迎留言告诉我们。

Originally posted at: cfug/diox#29

[AlexV525]

As one of our milestones, the first stable release has been published. https://github.com/cfug/diox/releases/tag/v5.0.0

[AlexV525]

The ownership of the repo and the package has been transferred to CFUG on 13th Feb 2023.

We (diox devs) are going to merge commits from diox and archive the new fork.

• Merge changes from cfug/diox #1637

[AlexV525]

All issues and merged PRs will be closed. If those problems haven't been resolved, file new issues.

[AlexV525]

https://github.com/cfug/diox has been publicly archived.

[mdeandrea-mrmilu]

@AlexV525 I understand that now CFUG can be keep the original repository(dio) and not use the fork (diox). It's correct? If yes, that will be awesome!

I add this commit to this thread, to developers get context of all changes.

Thanks for this hard work!

[AlexV525]

@AlexV525 I understand that now CFUG can be keep the original repository (dio) and not use the fork (diox). It's correct? If yes, that will be awesome!

Yes. the code bases have been merged successfully and you'll see dio v5.0.0 soon.

[AlexV525]

All packages underhood are published with a new stable version.

• https://pub.dev/packages/dio/versions/5.0.0
• https://pub.dev/packages/dio_cookie_manager/versions/2.1.0
• https://pub.dev/packages/dio_http2_adapter/versions/2.1.0
• https://pub.dev/packages/native_dio_adapter/versions/0.0.1

[Vovcharaa]

@AlexV525 Are you planning on maintaining cookie_jar as well?

[AlexV525]

@AlexV525 Are you planning on maintaining cookie_jar as well?

Offline discussed with @wendux and we are not going to take over that package since it's relatively stable, and @wendux are likely avaliable to respond change requests.

[AlexV525]

@AlexV525 Are you planning on maintaining cookie_jar as well?

The fact is I'm already on it, but we don't have any plans of transfer ownership, I'll just keep my eyes on it.