Upgrading from React 0.11.2 to 0.14.7 in 374 easy steps
npm dependency hell. I have a project that has 3,061 modules of which only 40 or so are either dependencies or devDependencies. All of this chews up 180MB!
With the new generation of JS libraries and frameworks, it’s the wild wild west. So choose your 3rd party libraries with the same due diligence as you chose React.
Ember announced yesterday that Ember 2.4 will be the first LTS release of the core framework
In fact, React itself is farily well documented, with changelog and all, and with small articles detailing breaking changes. That’s not the case for most libraries out there. The real painful part of the process is caused by everything around React, including the build tools.
Welcome to the brave new world
I am not a JavaScript developer but was asked to help the JS team just the other week with an npm build issue. The npm modules built fine on OS X dev boxes, but CI server running Linux was failing because older version of gcc was installed. While troubleshooting this, I came to learn a bit about node.js and npm ecosystem and I surprised slightly more than I expected. Apparently, it is considered normal now to have build process download dozens of these npm modules. Many of them are build time dependencies. Things that are good old native binaries (e.g. for changing compression levels of graphics files) are downloaded by npm and built from source. Then when module runs, it tries to execute them by pulling in one of half a dozen possible modules for executing native binaries. There is no logging. All code is written in crazy continuation style, because the framework is inherently asynchronous -- nevermind that it only matters in a handful of hot IO cases requiring optimization -- all code is like that, undecipherable. There is no logging or error handling. A 3 months old project setup by smart consultants who do this kind of thing 24x7 already has a significant number of deprecated dependencies.
These days things seem to have changed. I’ve been more or less in constant touch with Javascript and its ecosystem for a solid 8 years now and yet things don’t seem to get easier, to the contrary. So I don’t know, maybe it’s just me getting more conservative / impatient / you name it or maybe, just maybe, it’s the ecosystem that gets harder to work with, especially in the recent 2-3 years.
I think that for someone who just gets started on the job an upgrade task of this kind of task might feel a lot more frustrating. Perhaps so frustrating that they might flip the table, throw everything away and rewrite it from scratch.
One thing seems increasingly clear to me: this way of building software is not sustainable. What can we do?
