.NET Package Maintenance (deprecation)

[leecow]

.NET Package Maintenance

.NET Core was released in June 2016, and over the last six years, many thousands of NuGet packages have been published under the .NET umbrella. Many of these packages are legacy or out-of-support already. As things stand today, there is no information associated with these packages to indicate their support status.

To provide developers with better package support status information, the .NET team will start using the NuGet Package Deprecation feature. Deprecated packages remain visible on nuget.org, to clients such as Visual Studio and the .NET CLI, and can be restored by projects. In addition to updating existing packages, we will mark packages as appropriate when new versions are released so that developers can access up-to-date information on the packages they use.

Which Packages will be deprecated

As a general principle, packages that are out of support per the .NET Support Policy will be marked deprecated. Packages that were part of abandoned projects, such as dnx, will be marked deprecated, as will packages that were part of earlier preview releases.

After we are caught up marking previously released packages, we will update packages when new versions are released. For example, when .NET 6.0.10 releases, package versions for 6.0.9 will be marked deprecated.

AspNetCore 2.2 is a unique category, particularly around .NET Framework usage. We will work out how best to address these packages getting caught up and staying current at each release.

Timing

We would like to begin the package marking process next week and first want to hear if there are any issues that have not been considered. Please see the .NET Package Deprecation list and use issue dotnet/core#7420 to comment.

22-June Update

We have started the 'get-clean' process beginning with DNX packages and will proceed cautiously through the older, out-of-support releases. If you believe this package is deprecated by mistake please file a new Package Deprecation Issue and share your reasoning.