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.
It's a pile of CSS and a few scripts to show and hide things. And it has had three years of effort put in to make sure everything works mostly as it should. That's not going to change.
We're just not going to get anything new. It was fine for production use yesterday. What has changed that makes it less fine today?
Bootstrap 3 is probably more stable than the CSS most people typically write in all probability. I don't see the problem here, and this typical knee jerk reaction to carefully made open source decisions really sucks & does a disservice.
The only unprofessional thing is the entitlement to someone else's time.
Sometimes, there is a time to call a three-year-old project stable and move on.
I finally moved a new project to v4 alpha for some newer features because I'm tired of waiting. It's not ready for production yet so I'm happy to see this renewed focus for the main devs on v4.
Yet, I understand people having concerns with them dropping support for v3 not having the v4 in a production-ready stage.
But like you said, developers might as well get their hands on the alpha to and see by themselves if the use they make of the library suits their needs and works fairly well. For most people, even an alpha version will probably work fine.
The problem often is the delta between perfect, and done. It's hard, as a creator, to realize when something is great in other people's eyes. The creator looks at their work and cringes. Everyone else looks at it and claps. It's that delta that creates the drive for perpetual development.
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"?
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.
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.
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 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432546 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12433663 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432666 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12432915
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.
Not sure if I mean that sarcastically or not.
Maybe a fund-raise to have someone work on it full time, the way like what vue.js does?
Thanks.
