Clarify relationship with webpack-serve

[kadamwhite]

I've been noticing some back-and-forth in the README that makes it unclear what the future of this project is, or whether webpack-contrib/webpack-serve is a successor to this project or not. It would be tremendously helpful to the community at large if the README included a statement about the relationship between the two projects, because I've seen many conflicting statements from dev-server and Webpack maintainers in project READMEs, issue thread, and on twitter.

Please advise; and thank you all for your work building excellent development tools :)

[michael-ciniawsky]

TL:DR Use weback-dev-server, it's actively maintained

It isn't really decided yet, from a user point of view use webpack-dev-server for now, since it isn't possible to maintain webpack-serve atm. It's original author abandoned webpack-serve and some of it's dependencies are exclusively owned by him. I would co-maintain both packages until a ROADMAP is settled, but it would require an unjustifiable amount of additional work and resources to resolve the aforementioned dependency locks in webpack-serve. The rough plans currently are either to

1. Modernize webpack-dev-server similiar to webpack-serve (http2 (koa), websockets (ws)) (webpack-dev-server v4.0.0)
2. Or if and only if the webpack-cli gets support for subcommands (e.g webpack serve --options) in the near future to eventually reused the package name (webpack-serve) for naming consistency and cherry-pick what's needed codewise. This may involve other (bigger) refactorings aswell then

[michael-ciniawsky]

To clarify 1. is more likely to happen as of today but definitely not final atm

[alexander-akait]

@kadamwhite Briefly: use webpack-dev-server (webpack-serve will be archived in near future)
@michael-ciniawsky we can't use webpack-serve name due Andrew did not give us consent to this (he is owner and can do with package anything, so it is very dangerous to use this)

[kadamwhite]

Thank you both. I feel some README note might be beneficial here, given that less than a month ago I was hearing otherwise; however I understand if the situation with webpack-serve might preclude that. I appreciate your responses regardless.

[benwiley4000]

Hey, thanks for the info. 🙂

Can we follow up on this? I'd like to know an estimated roadmap for changes needed before v4.0 hits (including time estimates). Right now I'm on webpack-serve for a project and I'm not sure I want to immediately switch back to webpack-dev-server.

[alecmev]

@michael-ciniawsky

It's original author abandoned webpack-serve

Source? His latest commit suggests otherwise. The tone also implies conflict, what happened?

[alexander-akait]

@jeremejevs it is fork, webpack and webpack-contrib don't support webpack-serve officially, you can use it at your own risk. Some developers create problems, not code. Closer to the new year we will try to release a new version - lightweight and using websocket.

[michael-ciniawsky]

Besides of removing the deprecation note I don't see any changes being made to this fork? If the original author intends to keep maintaining webpack-serve and it's dependencies, he can of course do that as he pleases, but from an organizational stand point it's not possible for other contribs to do the same since some dependencies of webpack-serve are exclusively owned by him and would need to be forked/republished which we decided against. e.g webpack-serve and co could be moved to his account by commiting a LICENSE change and requesting a transfer at any time. I wasn't involved in any conflict around this and neither do I have a preference or 'strong feelings' about that matter. The main issue relies in the unnecessary confusion for users and the lack of feasible options for other contribs to solve it e.g we may have continued 'promoting' webpack-serve as a successor of webpack-dev-server since the code is definitely more future proofen then the current code base of webpack-dev-server, but again this isn't possible

[alexander-akait]

The question is answered. Still use webpack-dev-server (webpack-server is not supported officially and you use this package at one's own risk). Feel free to feedback.