[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".