[olfactory]

I think you should just hire a few smart people who can be dedicated to supporting these issues which are high priority outside Facebook.

These issues are extremely costly to teams using React and they absolutely need much faster resolution.

[vosper]

Why should Facebook pay for that? If there are issues that are extremely costly to a bunch of outside teams maybe they should be the ones hiring people to fix their problems.

[olfactory]

> Why should Facebook pay for that?

Because the overall health of the open source ecosystem around React and React Native depends upon the cost of development being somewhat predictable.

Most of the bugs in this category are inefficient for most teams to tackle because they get below the surface of the APIs and tooling. Not only is there (by design) no contract for how these things should work, but the appeal of React and React Native is that the developers and teams using them can be selectively ignorant about these things.

In life one must choose which things to devote energy into becoming expert in. These kinds of bugs tend to be show stoppers for teams impacted by them. It's a coincidence that Facebook itself has not been impacted, but someone needs to adopt a higher level view to realize these are very important issues which the maintainer should be addressing as top priority.

Facebook is a many billion dollar company and can surely afford to put a few more top engineers on the team to do this stuff. These things create major credibility issues for React Native supporters in their own orgs.

If Facebook decides to upgrade to a newer Babel library (for instance) and it creates a major issue with an open source library that is used by 30% of React Native projects, this warrants direct attention by Facebook.

If a RN update causes thousands of teams using RN to get failed builds, there should be someone at Facebook trying hard to reproduce the problem even if there is no obvious theoretical reason why it should have occurred and it is not impacting Facebook's builds.

React Native is a great project, but this stuff causes a tremendous amount of thrash and wasted time for the teams impacted. It could be much more efficiently dealt with by Facebook directly (and should be).

[pygy_]

It looks like Microsoft is pursuing React Native as an alternative to Google's Flutter.

It may be strategic for them to take that role and hire folks to work on React Native, either a MS fork, or as part of a conjoined effort with Facebook.

[danabramov]

That's exactly what ends up happening: companies that invest heavily in RN also contribute back (and even help us managing issues and releases).

[olfactory]

FWIW I think you guys should put out a major call for help to other companies and add more non-FB people to the core committers.

React Native is fantastic, but the ecosystem is thrashed around horribly by these kinds of bugs and the non response from Facebook for things that impact most of the non-Facebook open source ecosystem around React Native.

[nol13]

Been actively wondering if there would be enough interest/momentum for a community LTS fork.

Love RN, and the daunting vastness of the surface area not lost on me, but would be totally ok with me if development stalled for 6 months of purely bug-fix releases. Maybe I'd sound differently if I cared about integration with native apps.

[antris]

Better developer relations.

[tmaier]

This could even be a business model.

Pay $$$ or €€€ to get enterprise support, promissing to fix your issue with a Pull Request in the mainstream repository