Why not continue flex-layout development with a community maintained fork?

[thomastthai]

Proposal

What is the summary of the proposal?

Is there a community fork already in place? If not, create a community-maintained repo.

What is the proposal?

With the deprecation set, how much interest is there in a community repo to continue flex-layout development? There are currently over 50 contributors and the project has over 104K projects. Perhaps some of the current contributors would like to help?

Is there anything else we should know?

[CaerusKaru]

cc @DuncanFaulkner

[DuncanFaulkner]

@thomastthai I'm currently looking at doing this this week. there are a few things I need to set up first, so please bear with me

[pashvin]

Or please help to grow https://www.npmjs.com/package/ngx-flexible-layout

[DuncanFaulkner]

The new home for Angular Flexlayout is... ngx-flexlayout

I'm in the throws of cloning the package - I have used the library for many years and contributed to it on a few occasions and I wanted to keep it going, I have been waiting for version 15 to be pushed to Github (which it now is) and I've cloned the package and I'm working on getting a build and the CI stuff working (that's still very much work in progress). Hopefully, it will be up and running soon.

Also looking for people to help me maintain and support this project

[coyoteecd]

@DuncanFaulkner maybe choose a different name for the library? ngx-flexlayout is already taken on NPM, and publishing on a different name than your repo name will just add to the confusion in the long run.

[DuncanFaulkner]

@coyoteecd I created the org in NPM with that name but someone beat to pushing it up, at some point I would like to rename the project (I think we might have to drop Angular from the title at some point).

[DuncanFaulkner]

I've now setup a clone of the Angular Flex-Layout library- this is still very much at the early stages but I've got the GitHub repo set up along with the Circle CI and a package on NPM.

The new home is now at

@ngbracket/ngx-layout.

I've pushed up a pre-release version 15.0.1-beta.42, this version is just an initial release just to make sure things are working, the only thing that got changed was the name which has been changed from @angular to @ngbracket, some of the readme's, and documentation still need to be updated to reflect this change which I'm hoping to complete shortly.

Please do check it out I welcome all feedback
@CaerusKaru @coyoteecd @pashvin @thomastthai

[vince7488]

The author deferred from maintaining or updating this in the first place because he was trying to encourage people not to install packages and clutter their node_modules folder when they can learn how to implement display: flex on SCSS/Less/CSS3.

[CaerusKaru]

@vince7488 if you are referring to me or the team, that is not fully accurate. I always advocate for the best solution for each individual customer, and there is usually not one "best" solution for everyone. In this specific case, the decision was made solely based on resourcing available.

[jeffschulzusc]

thanks for this effort ngx-layout ...
i don't know the internals of Flex-Layout ... so:
what is the potential that future releases of Angular could 'break' current Flex-Layout ?

[DuncanFaulkner]

@jeffschulzusc This is quite possible, there may come a point where Angular does break ngx-layout, I don't think that will happen anytime soon (no guarantees of course), but I think that day is way into the future.

The main purpose I took this on was:

• to keep the library going for as long as possible, there are still over 270K downloads of this library each week.
• not every developer has the time or resources to replace the library, I would like to keep this going for them for as long as I can.

At this moment in time:

• I'm not looking to add new features to the library - but I'm open to suggestions and what the community wants.
• I'm committed to fixing bugs/defects that are raised, I have removed the beta tag from the library name, for example.
• I will create early versions of ngx-layout based on release candidates of Angular.
• I'm looking to upgrade to the latest version of Angular as quickly as possible after a major new release.

Will look at updating/refreshing the documentation and demo apps later this year.

As a side note: we are accepting sponsorship, please check out our sponsor page on GitHub.

[jackalvrus]

For the lazy people like me, who are looking for a quick link to the forked repo, here ya go: https://github.com/ngbracket/ngx-layout

@DuncanFaulkner Thanks for doing this.

[DuncanFaulkner]

Thanks @jackalvrus

[alessiobianchini]

Hello everyone, in my company, for an internal project, we have updated the ng-flex-layout package and fixed dependencies and related security.
Current ng version is 17.0.7.
If it may interest you, here is the link:
ng-flex-layout

[buu700]

@alessiobianchini, @DuncanFaulkner, and @jtc10005, thanks a lot for all the hard work taking up the mantle on this!

Just throwing this out there, would it make sense for you guys to combine efforts in some way? It looks like all three forks are pretty actively maintained, and without reviewing the commit histories it's hard to tell which one is best to switch to. Maybe there could be some value in combining any fixes/improvements from the three forks into one canonical version.