pub publish --dry-run not surfacing all package errors

[ditman]

Environment

• pub version or flutter pub version: Pub 2.12.0-214.0.dev
• OS version: Linux (doesn't matter)
• Are you using the Chinese community mirror or a corporate firewall? No

Problem

We're attempting to publish this Plugin:

• file_selector_web

However when I do pub publish on it, I get the following error:

...
Do you want to publish file_selector_web 0.7.0 (y/N)? y
Uploading... (1.1s)

pubspec.yaml allows Flutter SDK version prior to 1.20.0, which does not support having no `ios/` folder.
Please consider increasing the Flutter SDK requirement to ^1.20.0 or higher (environment.sdk.flutter) or create an `ios/` folder.

See https://flutter.dev/docs/development/packages-and-plugins/developing-packages#plugin

That's fine, and the error text is helpful (and I have a PR addressing the issue), however if I run pub publish -n in the same package:

...
Package has 0 warnings.

We use pub publish -n as a CI verification step for incoming pull requests to flutter/plugins. Is there anything else we need to do to get those server-side errors surfaced as well? We allowed a merge that is not "publishable" (and we'd like to avoid that).

Expected behavior

I would expect pub publish --dry-run to surface the same errors that pub publish eventually spits.

Actual behavior

pub publish --dry-run seems to only run a subset of the validations that pub publish does.

[ditman]

This seems like the same issue as: https://github.com/dart-lang/pub/issues/2743, just with a different validation failing.

[sigurdm]

The issue is that these checks happen on the server. Some checks could have a duplicate implementation in the client - but for some checks they might be specific to our server (another server might have less strict license requirements).

Also checks that happen in the client are there in that version of the sdk forever - while those on the server are easy to change moving forward.

Maybe we should have dry-run do a validating upload to the server... not sure - we would probably need another api end-point for that.
@jonasfj @isoos WDYT?

[isoos]

Maybe having a separate package for the validations would be the best here. It could be a dev or global dependency that CI runs, and while we may tie it to an SDK via the pub tool, it could be kept up-to-date when needed.

[RedBrogdon]

Just ran into this myself while updating https://pub.dev/packages/rebloc.

Looks like you're all over it, but here's my versions just in case:

Flutter 2.0.1 • channel stable • https://github.com/flutter/flutter.git
Framework • revision c5a4b4029c (2 days ago) • 2021-03-04 09:47:48 -0800
Engine • revision 40441def69
Tools • Dart 2.12.0

[jonasfj]

We can totally add a validation for:

pubspec.yaml allows Flutter SDK version prior to 1.20.0, which does not support having no ios/ folder.

We didn't do this client side initially because we wanted to have to ability back it out quickly if it caused problems for anyone.

Implementing it client side is no big deal, it only affects plugin authors who are cleaning up old plugins with ios/ folders that aren't needed -- so I'm not sure it's high priority.

[jonasfj]

Is there anything else we need to do to get those server-side errors surfaced as well?

No, server side checks like this cannot be surfaced client side.
The most important checks should all exist client side.

It's mostly when we do things out-of-band that doing them serverside first is a good idea. Or if we do checks we might want to revert.

---

Regarding this specific check, it:

• Only affects Flutter plugin authors,
• Who supports Flutter SDKs prior to 1.20,
• Have decided to remove their ios/ folder.

I'm not sure it's worth the effort to implement this validation two places. Please reopen if I'm missing a good reason.

It's not ideal to first get errors when publishing, but number of users affected by this seems relatively small.
I could even imagine that we might remove this check server-side one day, because if you publish plugins with lower bound constraint on flutter that allows <1.20, then you better test against such flutter versions too -- which would reveal this issue.

[jonasfj]

I don't disagree with the overall issue:

pub publish --dry-run not surfacing all package errors

And when we see other issues I'm happy to add more validators to pub.