ART deprecation

[Esemesek]

Hey everyone,
I became a react-native-art maintainer some time ago when I extracted this module as a part of the Lean Core effort. From day zero, I've noticed that there were a lot of legacy code and the library itself relied on old and no longer maintained library - art. This makes it challenging to maintain this lib, especially for somebody who didn't create it. react-native-art was never officially documented in react-native which made me do a lot of calculated guesses - tried to do my best to create it, but I'm still not sure that it is 100% correct and complete.

React-native-svg is a much better alternative to ART and provides a lot more features and community support. Also, I don't see any point in splitting the community and maintaining two libraries that are used for the same exact reasons, and to achieve the same goals.

My only worry is that ART is still generating noticeable traffic on NPM, mainly because of react-native-progress.

Going forward into the future, I think we should deprecate react-native-art in favor of react-native-svg. WDYT?

[brentvatne]

i'm fully on board with this. the library is not necessary and contributors would have higher impact spending their time elsewhere. from react-native-progress:

I’ll accept a PR migrating to the svg lib. Reason I went with ART to begin with was ease of integration which is now lost anyways and we’re just stuck with the bugs.

— @oblador, maintainer of react-native-progress (among other things)

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it would help for deprecation of this library if someone in the community helped rewrite react-native-progress to use react-native-svg instead of react-native-art. although, perhaps deprecating ART would motivate people to do it.

[frw]

My only worry is that ART is still generating noticeable traffic on NPM, mainly because of react-native-progress.

Just a note that react-native-progress recently migrated its dependency to react-native-svg in its latest release, if that were to influence your decision to deprecate react-native-art.

[yfunk]

@Esemesek @brentvatne Since react-native-progress migrated to react-native-svg there are only a handful of dependents with a somewhat considerable amount of weekly downloads left:

• react-qr-code (20.937 weekly downloads)
  Migration to RNSVG looks to be as easy as switching out a few imports.
• react-native-barcode-builder (6.532 weekly downloads)
  Already has an open PR for migrating to RNSVG.
• react-native-sparkline (2.058 weekly downloads)
  Migration to RNSVG looks to be possible without too much hassle.
• @momo-platform/component-kits (1.656 weekly downloads)
  Doesn't seem to be open source, not sure what ART is used for in this package.
• react-native-neomorph-shadows (1.110 weekly downloads)
  Migrated from RNSVG to ART a while ago for performance reasons, so probably still needs ART.

I think it would be safe to add a deprecation notice to the README of this package right now and refer to react-native-svg instead.

Once the majority of people have upgraded react-native-progress from 4.1.2 to 5.0.0 and react-qr-code has migrated to RNSVG you could go further and add a deprecation notice to the npm package itself.