Add Built-in Support for Removing Unused Packages and Assets

[ahmedelmwafy]

Hi team,

I hope you’re doing well.

I wanted to share an idea that could be a valuable enhancement for Dart and Flutter development workflows. Currently, developers often accumulate unused packages and assets in their projects, which leads to unnecessary bloat and can negatively impact project size and maintainability.

To address this, I developed two community packages:

flutter_packages_remover: detects and optionally removes unused packages.

flutter_assets_cleaner: detects and optionally removes unused assets such as images and other files.

While these tools are helpful, I believe it would be even more impactful if Dart or Flutter provided a built-in command to automate these cleanups. This would help keep projects clean, lightweight, and efficient by default, without requiring additional third-party dependencies.

Thank you for considering this idea — I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback!

Best regards,
Ahmed Elmwafy

[sigurdm]

I think the idea has merit, but we need to be a bit careful.

A package can be used in multiple ways, not only the code can be imported, but other parts of the package can also be used (assets, analyzer options, via package_config), so detecting "dead" packages might not be as trivial as we hope.