Why is my IDE complaining at me?
Perhaps you’ve seen one of these warnings in your IDE:
Prefer relative imports for files in
lib/.DO avoid relative imports for files in
lib/.
Messages like these come from Dart’s linting rules, which are warnings generated by dart analyze and communicated to you by your IDE. There is a whole list of linting rules and some of them even conflict with each other.
Relative to the topic of this article, there are a few different linting rules that relate to imports:
1. prefer_relative_imports
2. avoid_relative_lib_imports
3. always_use_package_imports
The first and the third are mutually exclusive. The fact that they conflict means you have to make a choice. You can’t use all of them.
You probably came to this page because you’re using a set of lints that someone else chose, whether that’s Effective Dart, or Flutter Lints, or Very Good Analysis, or something else, and you’re not following their rules. (Read Flutter Linting Comparison for more about this.)
As a responsible developer, the solution is to understand the problem and then to make your own decision rather than blindly…
