[Freedombox-discuss] Frontend-libraries in Plinth

[Michael]

TLDR: How about including an up-to-date version of twitter-bootstrap in
Plinth instead of using the more than two years old and already
deprecated debian package?


Long version:
The debian testing version of twitter-bootstrap is 2.0.2. It was
released in March 2012 and is no longer officially supported. The
current version of bootstrap (3.2.0) is quite distinct to this old
release. If I now implement features in Plinth using the old version, I
/ somebody will have to rewrite them when we move on to a newer
bootstrap version. (example: syntax of how forms and form-fields are
handled)

Migrating to new library versions is inevitable to keep an application
alive over a longer timespan. For example, the package we use to combine
django and bootstrap, python-bootstrapform, already outputs html syntax
that our bootstrap version 2.0.2 does not support.

In my humble opinion the debian release cycle is too slow to make sense
for the pace that web frameworks / libraries evolve right now. If we
cannot include a more up-to-date version via a debian package right now
(can we?) I propose to manually include (static link) the few
javascript/frontend libraries we use: bootstrap, jquery and modernizr,
<400KiB altogether. Or at least twitter-bootstrap because it had major
changes. Once the versions we use are available as debian packages we
can switch to them again. For me this seems to be way less effort than
coding against deprecated libraries.