[Proposal]: Export internal utilities

tay1orjones commented 2 months ago

Proposal

There are a series of helper functions, hooks, and other utilities within the monorepo codebase that multiple consumers have requested be exported so that they can use them within their projects.

So far this idea hasn't been acted on because these have been considered internal-only helpers intended to not be bound by semver. By publishing these and binding them to semver we run the risk of over-burdening the core system maintainers.

That said, this is a big opportunity for code reuse across the Carbon ecosystem. Having a dedicated package to surface helper utilities would reduce code duplication and encourage a unified approach to the purpose of each utility.

Open questions

How do we define a utility, and how do we determine if a utility should be exported for use across other projects?
Can some of these be framework agnostic so reuse could happen across the entire ecosystem?
Do react-specific utilities need their own package? @carbon/hooks?
Is there still a place for some truly internal-only helpers?
Do framework-specific utilities need their own package? @carbon/web-component-utilities?
What utilities should live within the monorepo? Framework agnostic and react helpers? All helpers regardless of framework? Do framework authors prefer helpers to live in the monorepo or their repo?
Is this package(s) bound by semver?
Who is this package(s) intended to be used by? Only framework authors? Framework authors and PAL libraries? Any project using Carbon, including projects building products with Carbon?
How could we document these helpers?
Should we establish a working group to help answer these questions?
...

List of proposed helpers to export

... need to generate this list with interested parties, please comment below if you're interested

github-actions[bot] commented 2 months ago

Thank you for submitting a feature request. Your proposal is open and will soon be triaged by the Carbon team.

If your proposal is accepted and the Carbon team has bandwidth they will take on the issue, or else request you or other volunteers from the community to work on this issue.

tay1orjones commented 2 months ago

carbon-design-system / carbon