6 ms·

Getting to Bootstrap v4

148 points by mattstrayer 10y ago

degenerate 10y ago
edit: title changed, thank you. Development is probably stopping on v3, sure, but that doesn't mean it will completely be unsupported and ignored. Let's say there is some major bug in v3 that comes out soon, you better believe it will be addressed. Otto just wants to push faster on v4 by dropping all existing split dev work.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- sorich87 10y ago
  It's the term @mdo used in other issues like https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/16913 https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/16913 "Bootstrap 3 is no longer being officially developed or supported."
- viach 10y ago
  "Should We Stop Bootstrap 3 Support? Probably Not." sounds better?
jasonkester 10y ago
Seems entirely reasonable. The response to this highlights something I've noticed watching Open Source stuff for a while: this attitude that a piece of software can never simply be finished, but that it must constantly be changing to be alive. This is a good example of that. Bootstrap 3 has been out for a while and it mostly works for the things it was designed to work for. If you look hard enough, you can find bugs and situations where it's not suitable to use. But that's fine. It's a super valuable thing that we all get for free. The new site I'm building on it looks way prettier than it ever would if I was designing it myself, and will remain so indefinitely, even if these guys never commit anything else to the project. I don't see anything wrong with the guys who built it stamping it "done" and moving on to the next thing.
- cdubzzz 10y ago
  Generally I agree with this sentiment. Having no previous exposure to Bootstrap's development process, it is interesting to see @mdo acting so unilaterally (and I can see why he is able to after reading his GitHub profile, hah). Particularly considering that he signs off all the issue closures as "@mdo and team". It's hard to understand that (again, as an outsider) without a deeper explanation. Given that, knee-jerk reactions to the mass closing of issues surely won't come as a surprise, but it also should make for some interesting debate. Is that the best way to stamp v3 "done"?
- toxican 10y ago
  Right now we don't have a maintained, release version of bootstrap. That's not really reasonable at all, imo. I understand wanting to focus on the next version, but maybe continue to maintain v3 until v4 comes out? Ditching support the day v4 drops is still kinda premature, imo, but still better than this limbo we're left with. Frankly this seems incredibly unprofessional.
  - smitherfield 10y ago
    In fairness, any bugs in a CSS framework are very unlikely to be especially significant from a business standpoint.
  - emidln 10y ago
    Perhaps you should chip in some time or dollars to help maintain a release version. The great thing about open source is that if you care enough, you can help yourself (either directly through code maintenance or indirectly via funding someone else). The only unprofessional thing is the entitlement to someone else's time.
    - porker 10y ago
      > Perhaps you should chip in some time or dollars to help maintain a release version. The great thing about open source is that if you care enough, you can help yourself (either directly through code maintenance or indirectly via funding someone else). I wish there was an easy way to crowdfund maintained releases. I've been burned by 3 frameworks moving on with no backwards-compatibility; that was worth money to myself & my business to keep them maintained. Unfortunately, not enough to hire someone full-time or coordinate it (the original developers in all cases had no interest). Does this exist?
silversmith 10y ago
On one hand, at least browsers are good about maintaining backwards-compatibility of CSS, so that pages that look okay with bootstrap 3 will continue looking okay for a good time. On the other hand, slapping "Don't care" label on all the issues of the current stable version seems... bit excessive. All in all, makes me happy I only use bootstrap for the CSS, and not the JS-based interactions.
ausjke 10y ago
Yes Bootstrap4 has been taking too long to the point I wanted to find an alternative. Maybe a fund-raise to have someone work on it full time, the way like what vue.js does?
Pigo 10y ago
This makes me glad that I've moved on to Angular Material
- talmand 10y ago
  Until Angular Material makes a similar decision in the future and then switch back to Bootstrap?
  - jmkni 10y ago
    They made this decision ages ago in regards to Angular Material for Angular 1.x, and Angular Material for Angular2 is in Alpha.
    - talmand 10y ago
      in the future
- sschueller 10y ago
  How is this any different than the mess between angularJS 1 and angular 2?
- oceanswave 10y ago
  I.. I see what you did there
0x0 10y ago
"Bootstrap 3 is no longer supported"... And no final bootstrap 4 release yet. So, there is NO supported stable bootstrap versions at all right now? :-/
- josteink 10y ago
  If Google taught us anything, it should be that it's nothing wrong with being in perpetual beta. Not sure if I mean that sarcastically or not.
niftich 10y ago
We just had had a thread about the new v4 Alpha 4 [1], in which several people reacted incredulously [2][3][4] at why developers would feel pressured to upgrade from v3 to v4 for existing projects. This news, not even 24 hours later, confirms others' and my fears [5], that v4's arrival will mean the cessation of releases -- including bugfix and maintenance releases -- on the v3 line, effectively making it abandoned. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432136 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432546 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12433663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12433663 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432666 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432915
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  Nothing stopping you or anyone else from keeping it up to date. I think it's silly to have these expectations from people creating free software for the world.
  - niftich 10y ago
    While I don't entirely disagree with your premise, this oft-repeated argument misses some key points. Every user is free to make changes themselves but upstreaming them to the 'official' repo won't work, because the devs have decided they've moved on. Everyone is free to maintain a publicly-accessible fork, but without community coordination, the forks will diverge, unless widespread community consensus is reached about which one is the preferred survivor repo. Essentially, to solve the problem, merely dumping code isn't sufficient; you must also build a community. Hence when a project's leadership decides they will no longer release/maintain/fix/accept-pull-requests-for a particular version, all of us lose the single most logical place where collaboration about that particular version happens. This is what I lament, not that woe-be-unto-me, I-have-to-fix-it-myself.
tellor 10y ago
Please provide more info about migration and examples with using new icons instead glyphicons. Thanks.
BigGillyStyle 10y ago
For all of you who have contributed free and open source software in your spare time, thank you so much for your contributions. I have used your projects personally and at work and have not given back as much as I have contributed. You owe me nothing. I have not paid any of you anything, and no doubt while I was riding my bike, doing some woodworking, or any other number of leisure activities...you were working on a project, probably often outside of your work hours. I have absolutely no say (in my opinion) on what you choose to do with your free time, including whether you decide to spend your limited free time developing a new version...which in this case may mean that you then don't have the time to continue to bugfix the previous version. If I really don't like it, well then I better step up with some money to fund some support or do the support myself.

148 points by mattstrayer 10y ago

edit: title changed, thank you. Development is probably stopping on v3, sure, but that doesn't mean it will completely be unsupported and ignored. Let's say there is some major bug in v3 that comes out soon, you better believe it will be addressed. Otto just wants to push faster on v4 by dropping all existing split dev work.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sorich87 10y ago
It's the term @mdo used in other issues like https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/16913 https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/16913 "Bootstrap 3 is no longer being officially developed or supported."
viach 10y ago
"Should We Stop Bootstrap 3 Support? Probably Not." sounds better?

jasonkester 10y ago

Seems entirely reasonable. The response to this highlights something I've noticed watching Open Source stuff for a while: this attitude that a piece of software can never simply be finished, but that it must constantly be changing to be alive. This is a good example of that. Bootstrap 3 has been out for a while and it mostly works for the things it was designed to work for. If you look hard enough, you can find bugs and situations where it's not suitable to use. But that's fine. It's a super valuable thing that we all get for free. The new site I'm building on it looks way prettier than it ever would if I was designing it myself, and will remain so indefinitely, even if these guys never commit anything else to the project. I don't see anything wrong with the guys who built it stamping it "done" and moving on to the next thing.

cdubzzz 10y ago
Generally I agree with this sentiment. Having no previous exposure to Bootstrap's development process, it is interesting to see @mdo acting so unilaterally (and I can see why he is able to after reading his GitHub profile, hah). Particularly considering that he signs off all the issue closures as "@mdo and team". It's hard to understand that (again, as an outsider) without a deeper explanation. Given that, knee-jerk reactions to the mass closing of issues surely won't come as a surprise, but it also should make for some interesting debate. Is that the best way to stamp v3 "done"?
toxican 10y ago
Right now we don't have a maintained, release version of bootstrap. That's not really reasonable at all, imo. I understand wanting to focus on the next version, but maybe continue to maintain v3 until v4 comes out? Ditching support the day v4 drops is still kinda premature, imo, but still better than this limbo we're left with. Frankly this seems incredibly unprofessional.
- smitherfield 10y ago
  In fairness, any bugs in a CSS framework are very unlikely to be especially significant from a business standpoint.
- emidln 10y ago
  Perhaps you should chip in some time or dollars to help maintain a release version. The great thing about open source is that if you care enough, you can help yourself (either directly through code maintenance or indirectly via funding someone else). The only unprofessional thing is the entitlement to someone else's time.
  - porker 10y ago
    > Perhaps you should chip in some time or dollars to help maintain a release version. The great thing about open source is that if you care enough, you can help yourself (either directly through code maintenance or indirectly via funding someone else). I wish there was an easy way to crowdfund maintained releases. I've been burned by 3 frameworks moving on with no backwards-compatibility; that was worth money to myself & my business to keep them maintained. Unfortunately, not enough to hire someone full-time or coordinate it (the original developers in all cases had no interest). Does this exist?

silversmith 10y ago

On one hand, at least browsers are good about maintaining backwards-compatibility of CSS, so that pages that look okay with bootstrap 3 will continue looking okay for a good time. On the other hand, slapping "Don't care" label on all the issues of the current stable version seems... bit excessive. All in all, makes me happy I only use bootstrap for the CSS, and not the JS-based interactions.

ausjke 10y ago

Yes Bootstrap4 has been taking too long to the point I wanted to find an alternative. Maybe a fund-raise to have someone work on it full time, the way like what vue.js does?

Pigo 10y ago

This makes me glad that I've moved on to Angular Material

talmand 10y ago
Until Angular Material makes a similar decision in the future and then switch back to Bootstrap?
- jmkni 10y ago
  They made this decision ages ago in regards to Angular Material for Angular 1.x, and Angular Material for Angular2 is in Alpha.
  - talmand 10y ago
    in the future
sschueller 10y ago
How is this any different than the mess between angularJS 1 and angular 2?
oceanswave 10y ago
I.. I see what you did there

0x0 10y ago

"Bootstrap 3 is no longer supported"... And no final bootstrap 4 release yet. So, there is NO supported stable bootstrap versions at all right now? :-/

josteink 10y ago
If Google taught us anything, it should be that it's nothing wrong with being in perpetual beta. Not sure if I mean that sarcastically or not.

niftich 10y ago

We just had had a thread about the new v4 Alpha 4 [1], in which several people reacted incredulously [2][3][4] at why developers would feel pressured to upgrade from v3 to v4 for existing projects. This news, not even 24 hours later, confirms others' and my fears [5], that v4's arrival will mean the cessation of releases -- including bugfix and maintenance releases -- on the v3 line, effectively making it abandoned. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432136 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432546 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12433663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12433663 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432666 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432915

whamlastxmas 10y ago
Nothing stopping you or anyone else from keeping it up to date. I think it's silly to have these expectations from people creating free software for the world.
- niftich 10y ago
  While I don't entirely disagree with your premise, this oft-repeated argument misses some key points. Every user is free to make changes themselves but upstreaming them to the 'official' repo won't work, because the devs have decided they've moved on. Everyone is free to maintain a publicly-accessible fork, but without community coordination, the forks will diverge, unless widespread community consensus is reached about which one is the preferred survivor repo. Essentially, to solve the problem, merely dumping code isn't sufficient; you must also build a community. Hence when a project's leadership decides they will no longer release/maintain/fix/accept-pull-requests-for a particular version, all of us lose the single most logical place where collaboration about that particular version happens. This is what I lament, not that woe-be-unto-me, I-have-to-fix-it-myself.

tellor 10y ago

Please provide more info about migration and examples with using new icons instead glyphicons. Thanks.

BigGillyStyle 10y ago

For all of you who have contributed free and open source software in your spare time, thank you so much for your contributions. I have used your projects personally and at work and have not given back as much as I have contributed. You owe me nothing. I have not paid any of you anything, and no doubt while I was riding my bike, doing some woodworking, or any other number of leisure activities...you were working on a project, probably often outside of your work hours. I have absolutely no say (in my opinion) on what you choose to do with your free time, including whether you decide to spend your limited free time developing a new version...which in this case may mean that you then don't have the time to continue to bugfix the previous version. If I really don't like it, well then I better step up with some money to fund some support or do the support myself.