Re: pgAdmin4 - Issue of unmaintained libraries - Mailing list pgadmin-hackers

Hi

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 9:09 PM, Joao De Almeida Pereira <jdealmeidapereira@pivotal.io> wrote:

Hi Dave,

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 8:32 AM Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:

Hi

On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 1:22 PM, Murtuza Zabuawala <murtuza.zabuawala@enterprisedb.com> wrote:

Hi Team,

As we are heavily dependent on 3rd party JS libraries and some of them are no longer actively maintained by their respective authors (Last commit was approximate year ago).

Some of the core libraries which are no longer actively maintained are,

- Backbone

- wcDocker

- aciTree

- Backgrid/Backform

- jQuery 1.x version

What would be our future plans when it comes to fixing the issues in the core libraries or adding new feature?

(Ref: Email thread)

Well jQuery can be updated can't it?

wcDocker is, as far as I'm aware, the only library of it's kind. Unless something else has surpassed it in the last couple of years, there's nothing even close in functionality to it. aciTree was in a similar position, though Joao and team think there may be other candidates now.

About the wcDocker, in fact it as a lot of features. In our User Interviews we didn't find any person that was using features like dragging and creating new panels. The only feature that we see people using was the tabs. So if the only feature that people use of wcDocker is really tabs there are some other libraries like: 

react-tabs or react-tabtab (Draggable tabs) or rc-tabs(Static tabs, with 52k Downloads last 7 days). 

On a personal level, I do re-arrange the panel layout.

On a practical level, we create new panels every time you use the query tool or debugger, or open properties dialogues etc.

 

For ACITree we already started the process of isolating it from the application, This will allow us in the future to replace it with something that is more up to date.

As for Backbone/Backgrid/Backform, I don't know. Backbone could maybe be replaced with React eventually. Not sure about the others.

In any case, this is likely to be a problem on an ongoing basis - and I think we need to consider the future on a case by case basis when necessary. It may mean moving to a different library, or it may mean forking components, or it may be the upstream may have not had any commits for a long time simply because there is no development happening right now, but bugs may still be fixed. 

We understand and agree that this should be handled case-by-case instead of replacing everything at once since it is not feasible to do a complete rewrite of the application.  But we also think it's hard to build new features on top of libraries that are no longer supported.  We don't really want to fork a library either because we'll become responsible for maintaining that library, which means maintaining more code.  We want to use libraries that are actively maintained so we can get security patches, new features, etc.  Also, if we need a new functionality on a specific library, we can, for example, open an issue and the maintainers of that library can implement it for us or we can create a pull request for them to merge.

Sure, but the main issue is that projects get abandoned all the time. We have no way of knowing what will get dropped and what won't until it actually happens - and even then it's not always clear, for example the wcDocker case where there haven't been code changes in some time, but the lead developer is still responding to issues very promptly. 

My point is that it's very hard to know when a component needs to be replaced, unless the team actually announces its EOL, and even then some components require a huge amount of effort to replace them, when in reality forking them and maintaining the fork may require significantly less effort.

--

Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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