Contributing to the migration to a new build system

[IsaacSNK]

Hi Team. I've seen many comments in different threads about migrating Shaka to a new build system. Do you have any roadmap or a list of changes that you think are required for this to happen? I can definitely contribute with a few hours of my time every week.

[joeyparrish]

At this point, we don't have a concrete plan. I suspect it is best left until a TypeScript migration, at which point the old build scripts and compiler will be easily deleted.

[IsaacSNK]

Is it worth migrating start by changing the code to use ESModules instead of goog.require and goog.provide? Assumming that Closure plays well with ESModules. I'm thinking that doing small incremental changes like that will make it easier to fully migrate to something else

[joeyparrish]

Perhaps. It has been discussed (here and here), but I've done very little research on this personally.

If people would like to experiment with this, I would suggest we start a new branch for it and PR into that branch. I would want to avoid doing releases from main with a half-complete implementation of a goog.module transition.

Let's move discussion to #2647, though, since we already have an open issue for goog.module.