Future of generator-backbone

[ruyadorno]

As one of the original Yeoman generators, generator-backbone has a lot of baggage and so many options/opinions that makes it a heavy burden to maintain - as a result the generator lost contributors and went through a poorly maintained phase. For such an iconic generator, it would be a shame to end up abandoned and filled with unresolved issues.

Here are some ideas for a better future:

• Reshape generator-backbone as a composable foundation for other generators
• Extract all opinions/choices into new separated generators that builds upon this one
• Create a new major release v1.0.0 for this new clear slate - this way we can still have v0.4.x around for anyone depending on it

I'm writing this down with the goal of collecting feedback and overall opinion from interested people - personally, I think this can be a good opportunity to set a good example on how to create/maintain composable generators, similar to what the Yeoman team did with generator-node -> generator-generator.

cc/ people that were involved with generator-backbone in the past: @SBoudrias @addyosmani @revathskumar

[ruyadorno]

Also cc/ people that have been somehow involved with the project lately: @marian-r @mteodori @tconroy @arthurvr

[sindresorhus]

👍

[marian-r]

Yeah, awesome idea. I think this generator should show the best practices for modern web app development in Backbone.js and maybe provide a foundation for other generators.

[rodfersou]

👍

[mteodori]

great idea, happy to help!

[rodfersou]

need to break the ideas in small issues

[ruyadorno]

@rodfersou good idea, once I start working on this I'll create one issue to track progress on v1.0.0 and others for each of the flavors

for now I'll keep updating progress here to keep you guys posted 😊

[rodfersou]

👍

[mteodori]

I've been creating some PRs for some of the latest bugs but I still struggle on composable generators a bit, for example when a command line option/prompt is set by a composed generator like "ui", the mocha ui style from generator-mocha, how can I re-use it in another generator when the storage of this value is namespaced by generator name in .yo-rc.json? I ended up loading it explicitly from that file but feels like an hack

[mischah]

Opps. Just stumbled upon this in the context of yeoman/yeoman#1653

Now I would love to know if there is a chance to keep generator-backbone alive.

[marian-r]

@ruyadorno what are your thoughts on this? I guess the most important question here is if there is anybody with a room for contributions?

I checked npm and there are 800 monthly installs of the generator. Do you think the number is low? And if so, is it low because of the current state of the generator? So, if we improve it would get higher traction? I know that days of Backbone might be a bit over, but I'm sure there are people willing use it if it fits their needs. Backbone has 700K monthly installs on npm.

[ruyadorno]

@marian-r totally agree, would be a shame to deprecate such a historically important generator, I jumped in to help at a time the generator was completely broken but unfortunately I don't have the time to move on with the outlined plans 😞 sorry by failing to update you guys on that, almost a year went by since my last update 🙀

@mischah essentially we just need someone to carry forward the original plan of rewriting a new v1.0.0 containing only the backbone parts and removing the dozen of setup options - the more tricky part is moving on with the second part of the plan (getting other generators to fill the gap of providing these dozen of options and maintainers for all those of course)

I'm happy to keep helping with code reviews and small fixes

[mteodori]

I am fine to step in, I am using Backbone at work with Marionette but it would be nice to understand which of the current options are still relevant, my current stack is on ES6 with Babel, Handlebars Sass and webpack2 with some extra help from grunt