Drop bower support

[Garbee]

Up for discussion... Should we drop bower package support?

Bower is not currently being maintained. While it still functions, I don't think we should aim to support something long-term that is not being maintained. We should focus on NPM packaging being our primary distribution for people wanting the sources locally. The fewer packaging systems we need to worry about and push to, the easier our deployment phases are which means we are leaner and can move towards doing them more often.

Any very compelling reason to continue bower support?

[sgomes]

One compelling reason is that it's not costing us any support effort at the moment :) bower.json pretty much sits there and picks up things with every release. The only change that's needed is updating the version number.

[tleunen]

Well.. Changing the version number could be done in a script when you update the version in npm as well. So I think you should keep it.

I thought someone picked Bower to developer a new version Bower 2, or Bower-next (https://github.com/bower/bower-next)

[DataTables]

Excuse the random person dropping in, but I thought I might be able to add something. The version parameter in the bower.json file is ignored by Bower now, so you don't even need to change that.

Having fun integrating my DataTables library with MDL at the moment :-)

[surma]

Let’s see how the ecosystem around Bower develops. I am all for reducing the amount of “things” and with npm supporting flat dep trees there really is no use-case for bower anymore, but right now people are still relying on it. Let’s recheck this before we release V2.

[iBasit]

After looking at this post and knowing npm supports npm shrinkwrap, I have decided to give a try, to move all my dependencies 20+ to npm.

But as I was trying to transfer each one of them, it came to my attention, that not all libraries have registered with npm as they have with bower. and Yes I know we can link each one of them manually.

So I wanted to share my experience on switching, which was cancelled it out in middle.

Following are some of the dependencies I was installing using npm, which I have failed to do.

"dependencies": {
    "bootstrap": "v4-dev",
    "font-awesome": "*",
    "requirejs": "~2.1.20",
    "requirejs-plugins": "~1.0.3",
    "googlemaps-amd": "~1.0.1",
    "angular": "1.4.7",
    "angular-route": "1.4.7",
    "angular-animate": "1.4.7",
    "angular-bootstrap": "~0.14.3",
    "angular-auto-value": "~2.1.2",
    "angular-google-places-autocomplete": "~0.2.7",
    "angular-google-maps": "~2.2.1",
    "lodash": "3.X",
    "ng-file-upload": "~10.0.2",
    "angular-timer": "~1.3.3",
    "moment": "~2.10.6",
    "humanize-duration": "~3.3.0",
    "ngSticky": "~1.8.6",
    "braintree-web": "~2.17.1",
    "angularfire": "~1.1.3",
    "firebase": "~2.3.2",
    "angular-moment": "~1.0",
    "angular-bootstrap-lightbox": "~0.10.0",
    "HTML5-Desktop-Notifications": "ttsvetko/HTML5-Desktop-Notifications",
    "angular-scroll-glue": "~2.0.6"
  }