dart-package-maintenance

This skill provides a systematic approach for maintaining Dart packages in accordance with community best practices. It is intended for package maintainers and software engineers managing collaborative repositories who need to ensure consistent versioning, transparent release history, and reliable publishing cycles. By following these guidelines, developers can minimize downstream breakage and provide clear, impactful release notes for end-users.

• Semantic versioning (SemVer) application: Applying major, minor, and patch bumps correctly based on breaking changes, features, or bug fixes.

• Automated consistency checks: Ensuring sync between pubspec.yaml version fields and CHANGELOG.md headers.

• Release workflow management: Best practices for handling work-in-progress (WIP) versions, tagging releases in git, and preparing packages for pub.dev.

• Pull request and code review standards: Guidance on maintaining clean commit history, handling merge conflicts with minimal rebasing, and effective PR communication.

• User-centric documentation: Strategies for filtering changelog content to emphasize user-visible impacts over internal refactoring or test-only changes.

• Use this skill when preparing to publish a new package version or after merging breaking changes to a shared repository.

• Always verify current release tags via git or pub.dev before modifying version metadata to avoid version collisions.

• Focus on clear communication in changelogs; omit internal-only changes that do not affect the public API.

• When resolving PR conflicts, prefer merging main into the feature branch to preserve historical review context and comments.

• Apply the -wip suffix in version strings immediately after a release to indicate that the package is currently in a state of active development.