[Fedora-packaging] jquery bundling for new packages

[Dridi Boukelmoune]

Hi,

My 2 cents,

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 2:50 AM, T.C. Hollingsworth
<tchollingsworth at gmail.com> wrote:
> My plan is to have two parallel installable jquery packages: one for the 2.x
> branch and one for the 1.x branch.  As much as I'd like to skip the latter,
> older IE versions will continue to be the bane of web developers' existence for
> some time to come.  We'll continue to support the 1.x series in Fedora as long
> as jQuery upstream supports it.

JQuery is a library that "often" breaks compatibility (compared to
what I'm used to). Having one version of each branch sounds a bit
restrictive.

> For stuff that needs older jQuery versions, ideally we can patch them to work
> with the latest version.  But for a quick fix, we can get most of them working
> with 1.10 using jquery-migrate [1] with minimal effort.  (All you need is an
> extra <script> tag in most cases.  :-)

This is javascript. The language is too dynamic and permissive for me
to feel comfortable with an automated migration. What if the project
uses some eval magic ? Does it work with both dotted and bracketed
notations ..?

> For stuff that uses really old jQuery versions where even jquery-migrate isn't
> an option (e.g. < 1.6), my first concern is whether upstream is alive in the
> first place.  Because seriously, that stuff is OLD.  We really shouldn't be
> shipping code that was deprecated three years ago!  If upstream is actively
> maintained, then they really need to get with the program.

While I agree with you, I also understand people who don't want to
migrate "just because" when the application is stable. Especially with
a library like jQuery that tends to rapidly deprecate and remove
stuff.

> That being said, our de facto policy regarding bundling is to grandfather old
> packages in, which means they can bundle those ancient versions of jQuery till
> the end of days if that's what they want.  Though I might have to ask FPC if I
> can add Provides: security-nightmare-waiting-to-happen to their spec files.  ;-)
>
> Where migration is possible, I fully intend to have everything unbundled for
> F21, wielding my shiny new provenpackager hammer wherever necessary.
>
> Going forward we'll treat jQuery just like any other library in the
> distribution.  When a new version comes out, ideally we'll migrate everything by
> the next Fedora release, or else provide a parallel-installable backward compat
> package only when absolutely necessary.
>
> If you want to help get ready, I suggest working with your upstreams to migrate
> to jQuery 1.10, using jquery-migrate where necessary.  That'll make our lives
> much easier when we get ready to unbundle.
>
> BTW, I intend to write up a couple of blog posts outlining the general plan and
> a list of tips for packagers who want to get a head start within the next month.
> But right now I'm busy working on some awesome tools to further automate nodejs
> packaging, since we're going to need a lot of nodejs-foo packages as
> BuildRequires for the various js-foo packages we want to introduce.
>
> -T.C.
>
> [1] https://github.com/jquery/jquery-migrate/
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