Working together with @capacitor-community/barcode-scanner

[tafelnl]

As the creator and previous maintainer of @capacitor-community/barcode-scanner I would like to mediate between you and @thegnuu to talk about the future of both packages. Although competition is good on the market, I think with software plugins this is a little different. I think it's in the best interest of the community to join forces and maintain a shared plugin. Especially since @thegnuu and others have put a large effort in implementing the ML Kit library as well. I guess the main question would be under which name the project will continue. @robingenz as you didn't submit a PR or anything to @capacitor-community/barcode-scanner, I guess you might already have ideas about your preferred course of action?

[thegnuu]

@tafelnl Thank you for pointing out, that this repo exists.

@robingenz I think it would be a good idea to join our forces and work on one plugin for the community since the problem that has to be solved is literally the same and the upcoming maintenance work to update the dependencies aso. will be the same as well. Just by looking at the download stats of npm, it might make sense to work on @capacitor-community/barcode-scanner since the user base seems quite higher with 18k weekly downloads.

I realized you have a few features the community was asking for on my side as well, like defining a detection area and scanning codes on an existing image.

Just let me know what you think!

[tafelnl]

Thomas isn't working at Capacitor anymore AFAIK. But Capacitor used to have Slack (not sure if they'll still respond there as they moved away from it a while back). And now they have Discord: https://ionic.link/discord

[JanMisker]

A few weeks ago @jcesarmobile checked in on the repository to see whether is maintained, maybe he can pitch in?

[robingenz]

it's still a bit weird maybe to transfer the 'ownership' to a 'third party' so to say.

I see what you mean but the same was done very successfully with ionic-native.

Indeed I think that Ionic/Capacitor should be involved as well in any transfer/deprecation.

Yes, I think so too. I would like to hear the opinion of the Capacitor team.

Another possibility could be to go the other way around; @capacitor-mlkit would be 'deprecated' as a plugin and transferred to @capacitor-community

Yes, that would not be in my interest. For one thing, this is not a single plugin but a mono repo with multiple plugins with their own npm namespace. For another, I appreciate the possibilities this GitHub organization gives me.

An alternative would be: We keep both plugins, but not both plugins use the same implementation. There are also reasons not to use the ML Kit SDK. I've had several requests now expressing concerns about privacy or build size. The Capacitor community barcode scanner plugin has been very popular so far. We may just leave the implementation there as is and give users the option to choose which plugin is right for them.

[JanMisker]

@robingenz the reason we want to switch to ML-Kit is because the current implementation is based on an ancient zxing QR decoding library which is poorly maintained and seems to cause issues on newer Android devices.

[thegnuu]

@robingenz @JanMisker I don't think that keeping @capacitor-community/barcode-scanner and maintaining it in the current state is a good idea. The current implementation is missing some features on both sides, iOS and Android, that would require a great effort to implement (scan area and stuff like this), and there would still be the issue that the results and performance using zxing and AVFoundation are not really usable, especially if you want to scan 1D-Codes. This is the main reason we decided to move on with ML-Kit for v5.

I don't think the privacy aspect is a big deal since all the processing happens on the device. I am not sure about the impacts on build size, I have never checked that, but I believe that this will not be an issue for the major part of the user base...

[thegnuu]

Thanks @tafelnl, I will reach out to them via Discord!

[mhartington]

Hey folks! Taking a look over the comments here, just to make sure I understand the plan, the plan is to...

1. Create a new @capacitor-mlkit or with @capacitor-mlkit/barcode-scanner as one of the plugins
2. Deprecate @capacitor-community/barcode-scanner on github and npm and point to @capacitor-mlkit/barcode-scanner
3. Update any docs references on the ionic/capacitor side to point to the new plugin.

Is this correct?

[robingenz]

Yes, that is currently the idea. But I have just posted an alternative above (see #45 (reply in thread)).

[thegnuu]

Thanks for reaching out @mhartington!

The repo and npm package already exists (the one where this discussion is held), it is a mono-repo including the npm packages for the org @capacitor-mlkit. The current plan would be to keep this repo as is and then follow steps 2. and 3. you mentioned.

To clarify:

1. Keep this repo as is to hold the new code base
2. Deprecate @capacitor-community/barcode-scanner on github and npm and point to @capacitor-mlkit/barcode-scanner
3. Update any docs references on the ionic/capacitor side to point to the new plugin.