Can I Remove A Library From Jcenter?

I'm working with some external libraries, and I stumbled across a thought this morning : what if the publisher removes his library from JCenter, Maven Central, etc...? (I'll just f

Solution 1:

Jcenter was designed to be immutable as it serves many users that depend on its packages.

Once a package is linked to jcenter it is there to stay.

If the owner deletes the package, bintray makes sure it stays available by claiming ownership (creating a copy of the package to be owned by jcenter).

The best practice would be to link your package to jcenter only after the code in your versions is production ready. The initial inclusion is a one off process. Once you have been granted your own path namespace in jcenter any new version you will publish will automatically appear in jcenter.

After publishing files/versions to bintray you have 180 days of grace to delete them. After that they become immutable and cannot be deleted.

You can also delete a specific file or version from a linked package if you are still in the grace period but you will be damaging your reputation as an oss publisher! since people will be importing those versions from jcenter and you will be breaking their code. this is considered bad practice.

Hope this helps.