rn-fetch-blob updates/future?

[ronzilla]

rn-fetch-blob is awesome, it's significantly better than plain old fetch. We've completely switched over to it, it provides much better control over network connections.

At this point it hasn't been updated in several months and there are 40 or so outstanding pull requests. Locally we're using patch-package to work around some rn-fetch-blob issues, have to work around some small type inconsistencies, etc.

@Traviskn What's you're thinking on the plan for rn-fetch-blob going forward? Are you open to people helping out?

Or is the plan to sunset joltup/rn-fetch-blob and we should all be looking for a different solution?

Sorry to use "Issues" for this, but I couldn't find a better way to get in touch.

[Traviskn]

Hi @ronzilla, I know that there hasn't been a lot of activity or maintenance on this repo lately, so I'll try to be transparent about the current situation.

Currently at my company we use rn-fetch-blob exclusively for file uploads and downloads (we use other http libraries such as axios for all other http requests). For our needs, rn-fetch-blob is working fine as-is and so we aren't able to prioritize much engineering time for making updates.

We have learned the hard way in the past that we cannot merge any pull requests without extensive manual testing, as we have been broken by bad PRs that seemed fine from a code review perspective, but ended up breaking under real-world usage. The time required to test is one reason why we haven't been able to prioritize merging any of the current open PRs. As we continue to update React Native versions we will be able prioritize the time to keep this library working on those versions (as of now we are running 0.58)

We would be open to help, the only issue is verifying the trustworthiness of contributors. So far we have only given write access to employees of my company.

We have occasionally run into performance issues with rn-fetch-blob that we have done some investigation into. We have also recently been looking into using Expo's File System "unimodule" as an alternative to rn-fetch-blob
https://docs.expo.io/versions/latest/sdk/filesystem
https://github.com/expo/expo/tree/master/packages/expo-file-system

I personally think that expo's file system library may be a better alternative to rn-fetch-blob as it is very well maintained, and can meet most application's file transfer requirements.

[Jason-Cooke]

@Traviskn, thank you for your transparency

[ronzilla]

Hi @Traviskn, thanks for the honest update.

It sounds like the tests in rn-fetch-blob-dev aren't enough to help verify each change? It's a tough problem given the native integrations involved.

If tests comprehensive enough (i.e. providing the confidence to merge PRs) to verify each change aren't in the plans, consider updating the repo info/docs with the project status. Currently the wiki says developers should feel free to make a PR or file an issue. It sounds instead like PRs won't be integrated, issues won't be addressed by the maintainers, and there are a couple of other libraries people should investigate using as alternatives.

It can still be super useful for people to submit PRs and file bugs, but people should not expect active maintenance from the repo owner. Which is OK! But if expectations are set then people can look at alternatives, create/maintain their own branches, etc.

Thanks again for the update!

[liganghui]

Hi @Traviskn I very much hope that you can merge this commit pull#296 , this is just a small problem with warning messages. issues#183 The community has provided a solution, but the problem will reappear every time the npm package is updated.

[erennyuksell]

Please send your PR here https://github.com/Frekansapp/rn-fetch-blob and i will be merge it
I don't have much knowledge about this lib but i merged some PR's coming this repo you could use it.

[Traviskn]

#666