Remove bower

[thom4parisot]

No description provided.

[fiznool]

@oncletom could I ask why bower support is being removed?

[thom4parisot]

@fiznool well, if people use bower they already have node and npm. If they do not use a build system, this is fine, the artefact will be available in the dist/ folder as before.

Bower is hardly maintained, and is more harmful than useful.

It will happen only with the next release, 1.0.0 so as the gap is important enough to be considered as a breaking change as well.

What do you think?

[fiznool]

@oncletom I guess my concern is for more 'mature' projects build on an older toolchain set, still using bower, but still needing to add new features. I'm in that boat myself.

For the most part, bower just works, and so I don't have a compelling reason (yet) to pull it out and use npm/browserify, etc. I'd rather docus on code maintenance and new features than swapping out my build tools.

Bower is hardly maintained, and is more harmful than useful.

Could you expand on this - I wasn't aware that Bower is considered harmful?

[thom4parisot]

Does it change many things if you pull a static file from node_modules/imager.js/dist/imager.js instead of bower_components/imager/dist/imager.js? Or would the move imply other annoyances as well?

[fiznool]

I think my toolchain is a bit more complicated than that, since in dev mode the files are served directly, and so need to be in a place where express can see them - but conceptually it could be something similar.

I guess this is ultimately my point though - I don't really want to faff around unless I have to! 😄