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I know. I hate it when people learn stuff writing free libraries to support new technologies and then release upgrades informed by what they've learned. I've

I know. I hate it when people learn stuff writing free libraries to support new technologies and then release upgrades informed by what they've learned. I've watched React Router grow from one-of-a-handful-of-experimental-routers-for-React-on-GitHub to the most well-known third-party library in the React ecosystem (tied with Redux). In that time, Michael and Ryan have learned plenty. They've also taught plenty. Libraries that experiment with their APIs, like React Router and React Motion, help all of us understand how to wield React better. I learned how to use contexts by dissecting React Router v0, when they were still an undocumented feature. I understand the frustration that upgrading creates. (My first React project was creating an isomorphic server - I was definitely sensitive to changes in the routing API.) Still, I hate seeing a whinefest every time a free library makes a change that an app author disagrees with. You're always welcome to {fork it, build/use something else, help maintain and give feedback on API direction}. Michael and Ryan are enormously friendly and welcoming to external input. Trying to embarrass the creators or turn them into some sort of open-source pariahs helps nobody.

andy_ppp 10y ago
If that were true why the pathological method renaming between versions. Maybe this is the equivalent of a 1.0 and now they are finally going to keep things stable but how can you trust that "this time".
- bsimpson 10y ago
  If what was true?
grovulent 10y ago
One of the things I admire about the tech community is their willingness to just give away their code for free. This is a cultural fact that has underpinned such an enormous collective gain of everyone in the entire world that I get genuinely worried when I see people get that mad at open source maintainers. I look at the scientific community and their inability to share their data with one another out of paranoia, publishing incentives etc... it's not just bad for science, it's bad for their community - their ability to enjoy each other's company on a daily basis. So you know - I just feel you gotta be kind to open source maintainers. They didn't break anyone's app. They just released new code that you don't have to use.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  Also, there is one massive part here that people are missing. From the release notes: >We intend to keep supporting the 3.x branch indefinitely (published separately on npm to aid in migration), although there will likely not be any future major versions based on that code. 4.0 is the future, but we won't leave you hanging if you want to stick with 2.x/3.x. It's not like they are pulling what Bootstrap did and just leaving everyone on the old version out to die. They are going to be supporting the 3.x branch indefinitely. If you don't want to move, then don't! It's not going to suddenly explode, they will still accept changes for that branch, and bug fixes will still happen.
  - timdorr 10y ago
    In fact, 3.0 is still being developed. I just pushed out beta.1: https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/releases/tag/v3.0.0-beta.1 https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/releases/tag/v...
    - Klathmon 10y ago
      Glad to hear it! I'd recommend putting more info on your support of 3.x/2.x in the FAQ linked here for when other places eventually pick it up. The only reason I knew that was because I took at look at v4 yesterday when i was bumping up some of my dependencies before our freeze. With the recent Bootstrap issues still fresh in many's minds, and the already bad reputation that many think the JS ecosystem is "doomed" to continue, it would help to really drive home the point that you aren't just hanging everyone out to dry.
marklgr 10y ago
The guy is pissed and he has a legitimate reason to be so; he doesn't try to embarrass anyone, I guess. The lib authors may be the most friendly guys of the city, it does not have much to do with the issue. In all fairness, this is a problem that plagues the whole JS ecosystem and not just this lib, but it's no reason not to mention it anyways.
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  Nailed it - I really do not understand what it is about the Javascript ecosystem (and particularly the React part IMO) but comparing it with the Elixir ecosystem where the underlying language is probably evolving faster even than JS is, Jose and Chris seem to make 90% the right decisions up front and not have to make massive fundamental rearchitectures every 10 minutes.
  - ng12 10y ago
    It's classic shoulders of giants. Elixir is built on Erlang, a 30 year old language/system/community, and a vast array of knowledge on how to do functional/concurrent/systems programming. Web apps were a completely different beast as little as three or four years ago. Despite the incredible progress of the last few years we still don't know the best way to go about architecting SPAs, of course things are going to be a little hairy.
  - cshenoy 10y ago
    Not trying to defend anyone here but I think you're making the wrong comparison. React (the library) isn't changing. Just like Elixir, JavaScript (the language) is changing for the better and almost everything is backward compatible. What folks are upset with here is react-router, an optional, third party routing library dependent on React. Authors should be allowed to improve their own projects otherwise they become stagnant as the libraries and languages they depend on evolve. It's why semver exists.
    - dismantlethesun 10y ago
      Much of React-Routers problems can be traced to the fact that it uses React components as its API. Yes, there's an alternative API in v3, but it doesn't seem to be very well thought through and is hardly ever used in examples. Another issue with React-Router is that fundamentally in a web-based system, the router is the core of your framework (middleware, hand-offs to controllers/views, etc. are all built around the abstraction that the router sets up). With React-Router embracign React Components as their API, it means that your entire application must be built to the same abstraction---entirely within the React system, with components nesting other components. I feel the problem of making a large javascript application client-side is best dealt with by keeping React as the view only, and putting everything else (router, dispatcher, models, etc.) in the form of another abstraction and not defaulting to component based architecture because that's simply what React does.
n0us 10y ago
> I've watched React Router grow from one-of-a-handful-of-experimental-routers-for-React-on-GitHub to the most well-known third-party library in the React ecosystem > Libraries that experiment with their APIs, like React Router and React Motion, help all of us understand how to wield React better If I read this correctly, you believe that it is still in experimental phase? I don't have any problem with people learning and experimenting, but using major release versions a your petri dish is obnoxious for all the thousands of people using react-router even if it is convenient for the core maintainers. There is a difference between an upgrade and an overhaul, with the extent of the changes over V2,3,4 they might as well have just released a completely new routing library or just maintained an experimental branch to figure out what actually works before releasing a series of major breaking changes in quick succession to the greater world. I'm aware that breaking changes are necessary sometimes, but rapid churn is not necessary, esp once you are post 1.0 release. If there were some burning reason to release an upgrade then that would make sense but this release does not even address some of my major pain points with the API. I also am not complaining about the cost and personally I don't see any validity in the "it's free so I am beyond reproach" mentality that open source people seem to have. What makes you think that I would thank someone for something that was free even if I didn't want it? Or that anyone would for that matter. Thanking people regardless of what they did, just because they did it for free, is one way to erase market signals which govern the direction of open source projects. I would rather just be candid and honest so that maybe people will remember that me and other devs in general are negatively impacted by breaking changes and therefore will consider keeping projects stable. I also didn't "try to embarrass the creators" and the only person on here to made this personal was you, who decided to name the maintainers by first name.
- ctvo 10y ago
  Or you could just not use it, or follow your original thought and fork it and maintain the older version. It's MIT licensed, so you're more than welcome to do whatever you want. Instead of doing any of the things that'd require work (like the creators did), you insult them. They must be oblivious or awful at software, right? > The huge change is because the maintainers are apparently unwilling or incapable of either A. Creating something good enough on the first, second, or third attempt, or B. are completely oblivious to the needs of devs trying to create practical software and don't understand that project stability is just as important as a good API.
kls 10y ago
I know. I hate it when people learn stuff writing free libraries to support new technologies and then release upgrades informed by what they've learned. I think there is some responsibility incumbent on the person implementing the library to actually vet the library for good design and pattern implementations, to ensure they are not adopting someones learn as they go projects (if that is an issue they are trying to avoid). This seems to be endemic in the JS space, as an example, I was surprised at how many people jumped on Angular 1.0 give it's serious design flaws that where evident with just a cursory look at the overall architecture of the software.

andy_ppp 10y ago

If that were true why the pathological method renaming between versions. Maybe this is the equivalent of a 1.0 and now they are finally going to keep things stable but how can you trust that "this time".

bsimpson 10y ago
If what was true?

grovulent 10y ago

One of the things I admire about the tech community is their willingness to just give away their code for free. This is a cultural fact that has underpinned such an enormous collective gain of everyone in the entire world that I get genuinely worried when I see people get that mad at open source maintainers. I look at the scientific community and their inability to share their data with one another out of paranoia, publishing incentives etc... it's not just bad for science, it's bad for their community - their ability to enjoy each other's company on a daily basis. So you know - I just feel you gotta be kind to open source maintainers. They didn't break anyone's app. They just released new code that you don't have to use.

Klathmon 10y ago
Also, there is one massive part here that people are missing. From the release notes: >We intend to keep supporting the 3.x branch indefinitely (published separately on npm to aid in migration), although there will likely not be any future major versions based on that code. 4.0 is the future, but we won't leave you hanging if you want to stick with 2.x/3.x. It's not like they are pulling what Bootstrap did and just leaving everyone on the old version out to die. They are going to be supporting the 3.x branch indefinitely. If you don't want to move, then don't! It's not going to suddenly explode, they will still accept changes for that branch, and bug fixes will still happen.
- timdorr 10y ago
  In fact, 3.0 is still being developed. I just pushed out beta.1: https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/releases/tag/v3.0.0-beta.1 https://github.com/ReactTraining/react-router/releases/tag/v...
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    Glad to hear it! I'd recommend putting more info on your support of 3.x/2.x in the FAQ linked here for when other places eventually pick it up. The only reason I knew that was because I took at look at v4 yesterday when i was bumping up some of my dependencies before our freeze. With the recent Bootstrap issues still fresh in many's minds, and the already bad reputation that many think the JS ecosystem is "doomed" to continue, it would help to really drive home the point that you aren't just hanging everyone out to dry.

marklgr 10y ago

The guy is pissed and he has a legitimate reason to be so; he doesn't try to embarrass anyone, I guess. The lib authors may be the most friendly guys of the city, it does not have much to do with the issue. In all fairness, this is a problem that plagues the whole JS ecosystem and not just this lib, but it's no reason not to mention it anyways.

andy_ppp 10y ago
Nailed it - I really do not understand what it is about the Javascript ecosystem (and particularly the React part IMO) but comparing it with the Elixir ecosystem where the underlying language is probably evolving faster even than JS is, Jose and Chris seem to make 90% the right decisions up front and not have to make massive fundamental rearchitectures every 10 minutes.
- ng12 10y ago
  It's classic shoulders of giants. Elixir is built on Erlang, a 30 year old language/system/community, and a vast array of knowledge on how to do functional/concurrent/systems programming. Web apps were a completely different beast as little as three or four years ago. Despite the incredible progress of the last few years we still don't know the best way to go about architecting SPAs, of course things are going to be a little hairy.
- cshenoy 10y ago
  Not trying to defend anyone here but I think you're making the wrong comparison. React (the library) isn't changing. Just like Elixir, JavaScript (the language) is changing for the better and almost everything is backward compatible. What folks are upset with here is react-router, an optional, third party routing library dependent on React. Authors should be allowed to improve their own projects otherwise they become stagnant as the libraries and languages they depend on evolve. It's why semver exists.
  - dismantlethesun 10y ago
    Much of React-Routers problems can be traced to the fact that it uses React components as its API. Yes, there's an alternative API in v3, but it doesn't seem to be very well thought through and is hardly ever used in examples. Another issue with React-Router is that fundamentally in a web-based system, the router is the core of your framework (middleware, hand-offs to controllers/views, etc. are all built around the abstraction that the router sets up). With React-Router embracign React Components as their API, it means that your entire application must be built to the same abstraction---entirely within the React system, with components nesting other components. I feel the problem of making a large javascript application client-side is best dealt with by keeping React as the view only, and putting everything else (router, dispatcher, models, etc.) in the form of another abstraction and not defaulting to component based architecture because that's simply what React does.

n0us 10y ago

> I've watched React Router grow from one-of-a-handful-of-experimental-routers-for-React-on-GitHub to the most well-known third-party library in the React ecosystem > Libraries that experiment with their APIs, like React Router and React Motion, help all of us understand how to wield React better If I read this correctly, you believe that it is still in experimental phase? I don't have any problem with people learning and experimenting, but using major release versions a your petri dish is obnoxious for all the thousands of people using react-router even if it is convenient for the core maintainers. There is a difference between an upgrade and an overhaul, with the extent of the changes over V2,3,4 they might as well have just released a completely new routing library or just maintained an experimental branch to figure out what actually works before releasing a series of major breaking changes in quick succession to the greater world. I'm aware that breaking changes are necessary sometimes, but rapid churn is not necessary, esp once you are post 1.0 release. If there were some burning reason to release an upgrade then that would make sense but this release does not even address some of my major pain points with the API. I also am not complaining about the cost and personally I don't see any validity in the "it's free so I am beyond reproach" mentality that open source people seem to have. What makes you think that I would thank someone for something that was free even if I didn't want it? Or that anyone would for that matter. Thanking people regardless of what they did, just because they did it for free, is one way to erase market signals which govern the direction of open source projects. I would rather just be candid and honest so that maybe people will remember that me and other devs in general are negatively impacted by breaking changes and therefore will consider keeping projects stable. I also didn't "try to embarrass the creators" and the only person on here to made this personal was you, who decided to name the maintainers by first name.

ctvo 10y ago
Or you could just not use it, or follow your original thought and fork it and maintain the older version. It's MIT licensed, so you're more than welcome to do whatever you want. Instead of doing any of the things that'd require work (like the creators did), you insult them. They must be oblivious or awful at software, right? > The huge change is because the maintainers are apparently unwilling or incapable of either A. Creating something good enough on the first, second, or third attempt, or B. are completely oblivious to the needs of devs trying to create practical software and don't understand that project stability is just as important as a good API.

kls 10y ago

I know. I hate it when people learn stuff writing free libraries to support new technologies and then release upgrades informed by what they've learned. I think there is some responsibility incumbent on the person implementing the library to actually vet the library for good design and pattern implementations, to ensure they are not adopting someones learn as they go projects (if that is an issue they are trying to avoid). This seems to be endemic in the JS space, as an example, I was surprised at how many people jumped on Angular 1.0 give it's serious design flaws that where evident with just a cursory look at the overall architecture of the software.