
Getting to Bootstrap v4 - mattstrayer
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/20631
======
jasonkester
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.

~~~
toxican
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.

~~~
jasonkester
This is exactly the attitude I describe above. Why does Bootstrap need
_maintaining_?

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?

~~~
toxican
Judging by the backlog of bugs they wiped out or moved over to v4, clearly it
_does_ need maintaining. CSS and JS both always find a way to behave oddly in
fringe cases, so yes they do need bug fixes here and there. I absolutely
understand that if it was fine for production yesterday, it's fine for today.
And I'm not going to let this stop me from using v3. I just think it's rather
unprofessional or at least hasty to ditch v3 before v4 is finalized. And it's
not like this is some tiny little side project like a js slider or whatever,
it's (for better or worse) a very large part of modern frontend web
development.

~~~
emgee3
I'm not disagreeing, but one thing that makes this different is you can easily
fix most Bootstrap bugs by overriding it with some custom CSS, or just not use
that class. It's different than some deeply integrated code that you have to
patch and maintain.

~~~
niftich
I fail to a meaningful distinction between:

"you can easily fix most Bootstrap bugs by overriding it with some custom CSS"
vs. "you can easily fix most [imperative/OO/functional programming language's
library] bugs by overriding it with some custom [code]"

and

"just not use that CSS class" vs. "just not use that [method/function/class]"

~~~
emgee3
It might be the same, it might not.

An contrived example: let's say an unfixed Bootstrap 3 bug is that there is a
formatting error when rendering "div.jumbotron > h1 > span.label > small". You
could replace the last small with you own css class and be done.

Contrast that to a bug in Angular, for example, that enabled a XSS bug. You'd
want to upgrade Angular, instead of manually patching or adding a workaround
to all your forms.

That's what I was thinking, at least.

------
degenerate
_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.

~~~
sorich87
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."

------
silversmith
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.

------
BigGillyStyle
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.

------
niftich
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
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
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.

------
0x0
"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
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.

------
ausjke
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?

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

Thanks.

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

~~~
talmand
Until Angular Material makes a similar decision in the future and then switch
back to Bootstrap?

~~~
jmkni
They made this decision ages ago in regards to Angular Material for Angular
1.x, and Angular Material for Angular2 is in Alpha.

~~~
talmand
_in the future_

