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Blacklight provides a discovery interface for any Solr (http://lucene.apache.org/solr) index.
http://projectblacklight.org/
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Bootstrap 4 is EOL. Stop supporting it? #3211

Open jcoyne opened 2 weeks ago

jcoyne commented 2 weeks ago

https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.6/end-of-life/ - as of January 1, 2023.

jrochkind commented 2 weeks ago

My personal argument is that:

a) Stopping support for Bootstrap 4 is a major backwards incompatibility that requires a version bump, and b) it is preferable to get more adoption of Blacklight 8 before a version bump to Blacklight 9

After a period where few deployments were on the latest version (or even version(s) of Blacklight), with BL7 we finally got some community consolidation, with many institutions on 7 (although we don't have statistics). But my impression is that BL8 adoption is still pretty rare. The community being spread out between versions is a real challenge, making it even harder to muster development resources, and resulting in lots of energy being spent on trying to support multiple versions at once (whether with development, or even just "support" meaning Q&A help conversations in community)

It's not really about the version numbers of course; it's about adding more backwards incompat changes, or changes that make it harder for people to upgrade, when the community already isn't up to date. It would be better to figure out what can be done to make it easier for more people to get to BL8 before introducing more barriers to getting to latest.

Disclosure, I am not on BL8 yet myself, it's definitely a personal interest too, but it seems like it's not just me.

Some things that would help make this decision based on more than just impressions of adoption, would be trying to get numbers on a) How many adopters are on BL8 vs 7 (vs previous versions), and b) how many adopters are currently on Bootstrap 4 vs 5 (Bootstrap 5 is supported, we think, in both BL7 and 8; my impression is that most adopters on BL7 are also on Bootstrap 4).

While Bootstrap 4 is "end of life" and not supported, I think it's likely to keep working just fine for some time; security vulnerabilities are unlikely, and are likely to have third-party community supported patches made available if severe.

jcoyne commented 2 weeks ago

Be aware that this requirement is in conflict with some accessibility issues like https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight_range_limit/pull/257, where it's very challenging to have markup that supports accessibility and works for both Bootstrap 4 and Bootstrap 5. I think that ease of maintenance concerns, accessibility concerns, and perception of community health means that it's reasonable to release a major version every two years or so.