Dart 3.8.0 added Doc Imports which:
enables external elements to be referenced in documentation comments without actually importing them
Currently, dependency_validator doesn't appear to consider these doc imports as usages. So, if a package is imported only in Doc Imports and not in regular imports, dependency_validator will detect it as unused. I think these only need to be declared as a dev_dependency, despite being in lib/.
In practice, it might be rare for packages to have doc comment references to packages that they don't actually depend on.
Dart 3.8.0 added Doc Imports which:
Currently, dependency_validator doesn't appear to consider these doc imports as usages. So, if a package is imported only in Doc Imports and not in regular imports, dependency_validator will detect it as unused. I think these only need to be declared as a dev_dependency, despite being in
lib/.In practice, it might be rare for packages to have doc comment references to packages that they don't actually depend on.