[Question] What is the future of this project?

[mhassan1]

What

Questions:

1. Given the transition of polyfill-service from JakeChampion to polyfillpolyfill (https://twitter.com/JakeDChampion/status/1761315227008643367), what is the future of the polyfill-library project?
2. I see there is a https://github.com/polyfillpolyfill/polyfill-library repository; is the plan to move everything (commit history, issues, pull requests) over there?
3. Who will be leading the maintenance of this project, moving forward?

[romainmenke]

I've set up a hard fork here : https://github.com/mrhenry/polyfill-library
There is still some work needed to finalize that but the initial work is done.

Mr. Henry (the company I work for) still has a need for polyfills and the polyfill-library repo is an excellent framework to develop, test and distribute polyfills for the web.

We do not make use of polyfill.io or our own hosted variant, but rather bundle all polyfills together with application code with Babel. We leverage babel + core-js for all JavaScript language features and only use the web features from the polyfill-library.

This implies that we won't be putting in the time to add any new polyfills for JavaScript language features. But we are happy to maintain the existing features and review new additions.

For web features we might spend the time to add or develop new polyfills if we have client work that can leverage this. Also happy to maintain and review contributions for this.

A hard fork allows us shift focus towards our needs without hijacking the original.
This made more sense to us.

What we guarantee however is that we will maintain the framework. We think there is too much value in being able to easily develop and test polyfills. So even if months go by without new features we will always ensure the project is healthy and ready for new additions or fixes.

Work that has been done:

• all security warnings in dev dependencies have been resolved
• a lot of dev dependencies have been removed
• some underused dev scripts have been removed
• clearer dependency declaration for polyfills
• removed any dependency on FT packages : https://github.com/mrhenry/polyfill-library/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#v500

Todo:

• reduce the API surface of the library
• decrease CI flakiness

In general we are looking for ways to reduce the maintenance cost of the framework around all the polyfills.

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My own time is limited. I am balancing a full time job, maintenance of everything under https://github.com/csstools, W3C work as invited expert in CSSWG, ... Any collaboration would be massively appreciated!

So if you think our fork still aligns with your needs and goals then maybe it makes sense to work together there @mhassan1?

[mhassan1]

@romainmenke Thanks for the writeup! Historically, my organization's need for polyfill-library has been primarily for JS language features, when we supported IE11. Since we no longer support IE11, I imagine we should not have much need for polyfill-library for much longer.

That being said, I have enjoyed making contributions to polyfill-library over the last few years, and I would be happy to continue doing that.

I am curious where the polyfill-service forks will be getting new polyfills; see cdnjs/polyfill-service#4.

[romainmenke]

I am also curious what will happen with those forks.
I guess they will be mostly frozen as they were a knee jerk reaction to the ownership transfer.

If you want I'll add you as a collaborator here?

[mhassan1]

If you want I'll add you as a collaborator here?

@romainmenke Works for me, thanks!