[jasonkester]

Seems entirely reasonable.

The response to this highlights something I've noticed watching Open Source stuff for a while: this attitude that a piece of software can never simply be finished, but that it must constantly be changing to be alive.

This is a good example of that. Bootstrap 3 has been out for a while and it mostly works for the things it was designed to work for. If you look hard enough, you can find bugs and situations where it's not suitable to use. But that's fine. It's a super valuable thing that we all get for free. The new site I'm building on it looks way prettier than it ever would if I was designing it myself, and will remain so indefinitely, even if these guys never commit anything else to the project.

I don't see anything wrong with the guys who built it stamping it "done" and moving on to the next thing.

[toxican]

Right now we don't have a maintained, release version of bootstrap. That's not really reasonable at all, imo. I understand wanting to focus on the next version, but maybe continue to maintain v3 until v4 comes out? Ditching support the day v4 drops is still kinda premature, imo, but still better than this limbo we're left with. Frankly this seems incredibly unprofessional.

[jasonkester]

This is exactly the attitude I describe above. Why does Bootstrap need maintaining?

It's a pile of CSS and a few scripts to show and hide things. And it has had three years of effort put in to make sure everything works mostly as it should. That's not going to change.

We're just not going to get anything new. It was fine for production use yesterday. What has changed that makes it less fine today?

[toxican]

Judging by the backlog of bugs they wiped out or moved over to v4, clearly it does need maintaining. CSS and JS both always find a way to behave oddly in fringe cases, so yes they do need bug fixes here and there. I absolutely understand that if it was fine for production yesterday, it's fine for today. And I'm not going to let this stop me from using v3. I just think it's rather unprofessional or at least hasty to ditch v3 before v4 is finalized. And it's not like this is some tiny little side project like a js slider or whatever, it's (for better or worse) a very large part of modern frontend web development.

[emgee3]

I'm not disagreeing, but one thing that makes this different is you can easily fix most Bootstrap bugs by overriding it with some custom CSS, or just not use that class. It's different than some deeply integrated code that you have to patch and maintain.

[niftich]

I fail to a meaningful distinction between:

"you can easily fix most Bootstrap bugs by overriding it with some custom CSS" vs. "you can easily fix most [imperative/OO/functional programming language's library] bugs by overriding it with some custom [code]"

and

"just not use that CSS class" vs. "just not use that [method/function/class]"

[emgee3]

It might be the same, it might not.

An contrived example: let's say an unfixed Bootstrap 3 bug is that there is a formatting error when rendering "div.jumbotron > h1 > span.label > small". You could replace the last small with you own css class and be done.

Contrast that to a bug in Angular, for example, that enabled a XSS bug. You'd want to upgrade Angular, instead of manually patching or adding a workaround to all your forms.

That's what I was thinking, at least.

[splintercell]

> Why does Bootstrap need maintaining?

Then why say that you're ending the support for Bootstrap 3? Clearly something IS not going to be done from this point onward, and it's that thing which is worrying people.

[WorldMaker]

At this point "ending the support" is a semantics fight. When the Bootstrap team here says they are ending the support on v3, they are saying that they are closing issues and PRs that are v3-only and focus on finishing v4.

What they are not "ending" at all is "We still recommend v3 for production and believe it to be stable".

The complication here is the two meanings of "support" of "recommendation to use for your production efforts" versus "we are actively helping a tiny fraction of users with long-tail bug reports".

[Bahamut]

What is bad is this state where companies expect open source to cater to their whims and not putting in the resources to help maintain/develop projects with stretched resources - that is far worse than the (dubious) unprofessionalism of the Bootstrap maintainers' decision here.

Bootstrap 3 is probably more stable than the CSS most people typically write in all probability. I don't see the problem here, and this typical knee jerk reaction to carefully made open source decisions really sucks & does a disservice.

[noahth]

The maintainers of Bootstrap have day jobs. Bootstrap is not the day job. Insisting someone maintain your idea of professionalism in what is essentially a public service they perform in their free time is an odd way to spend your free time. You want bugs fixed on v3? Get off of HN and fix 'em.

[sjellis]

The Bootstrap maintainers decided to perform that service, defined the terms of the service was, encouraged people to use that service, and now appear to be withdrawing that service at no notice.

IMO, the "not your vendor" line is perfectly reasonable when we are talking about code that was just made available by posting it in a GitHub repo or a blog. Once the members of a project actively promote their product to other people, and happily witness very large numbers of people take the advice and use the product for years in their own projects, I think that it's rather a breach of trust to suddenly change their minds.

The minimum that could have done is given notice that they were struggling for resources and given people in the community an opportunity to help, and perhaps even request that someone from the community step up and become Bootstrap 3 maintainer to handle any necessary bugfixes until users could transition to Bootstrap 4.

[emidln]

Perhaps you should chip in some time or dollars to help maintain a release version. The great thing about open source is that if you care enough, you can help yourself (either directly through code maintenance or indirectly via funding someone else).

The only unprofessional thing is the entitlement to someone else's time.

[porker]

> Perhaps you should chip in some time or dollars to help maintain a release version. The great thing about open source is that if you care enough, you can help yourself (either directly through code maintenance or indirectly via funding someone else).

I wish there was an easy way to crowdfund maintained releases. I've been burned by 3 frameworks moving on with no backwards-compatibility; that was worth money to myself & my business to keep them maintained.

Unfortunately, not enough to hire someone full-time or coordinate it (the original developers in all cases had no interest).

Does this exist?

[seangrogg]

While it's not an exact match, patreon.com more or less does this in letting people crowdsource one-time/monthly payments to a person in exchange for their works. I know several musicians, youtubers, and social media personalities that have used it to varying degrees of success.

[talmand]

Seems to me it was stated that it will be maintained, just that commits will slow down. Plus, it's open source, why can't the community work on the last open issues while the team moves forward on v4 which is already falling behind?

Sometimes, there is a time to call a three-year-old project stable and move on.

[smitherfield]

In fairness, any bugs in a CSS framework are very unlikely to be especially significant from a business standpoint.

[jcadam]

I'm building a new application on v4 at the moment and there are definitely bugs. But as a solo developer (yea, this is a 'side' project, albeit one I'm taking somewhat seriously) who isn't particularly skilled in UI design I couldn't imagine trying to whip up an interface without something like Bootstrap (or Foundation, et al.). I'd end up with something functional but with a decidedly 1990s vibe :)

[jly]

Long time v2 and v3 user - I'm happy to see them mark v3 as 'done'. It's good enough. Bugs exist, but they'll be worked on at a reasonable priority.

I finally moved a new project to v4 alpha for some newer features because I'm tired of waiting. It's not ready for production yet so I'm happy to see this renewed focus for the main devs on v4.

[jordanbecker]

I agree, v3 can be marked as done easily.

Yet, I understand people having concerns with them dropping support for v3 not having the v4 in a production-ready stage.

But like you said, developers might as well get their hands on the alpha to and see by themselves if the use they make of the library suits their needs and works fairly well. For most people, even an alpha version will probably work fine.

[beautifulpeople]

>attitude that a piece of software can never simply be finished

The problem often is the delta between perfect, and done. It's hard, as a creator, to realize when something is great in other people's eyes. The creator looks at their work and cringes. Everyone else looks at it and claps. It's that delta that creates the drive for perpetual development.

[cdubzzz]

Generally I agree with this sentiment. Having no previous exposure to Bootstrap's development process, it is interesting to see @mdo acting so unilaterally (and I can see why he is able to after reading his GitHub profile, hah). Particularly considering that he signs off all the issue closures as "@mdo and team". It's hard to understand that (again, as an outsider) without a deeper explanation.

Given that, knee-jerk reactions to the mass closing of issues surely won't come as a surprise, but it also should make for some interesting debate. Is that the best way to stamp v3 "done"?

[jnem]

Art is never completed, only abandoned.