v5 release chores

[jimbolla]

Starting a list of things related getting v5 out the door.

• Unhide new features - currently they are hidden so that nobody starts using them, just in case we roll this back. I'll make a PR (exposes new features to the API #474) that will unhide them that can be merged in once we're confident that these changes will go live.
• Create release notes - needs to describe: still API compatible, synopsis of internal architectural changes, perf changes, bugs fixed, new features added
• Review/revise release notes @timdorr toughts?
• Write documentation for new features. Need to adequately describe connectAdvanced, as well as new options passable to connect. PR Update API docs for v5 #480
• Review/revise new docs. @timdorr @markerikson toughts?
• Fix controlled input issues Connected text input cursor position reset on input #525
• Release another beta with the new features exposed. Add beta to the github Releases page.

Nice to Haves:

• Refactor tests? - now that connect is split into to conceptual pieces: connectAdvanced for store subscription and component lifecycle stuff vs connect's selector functions, many of the tests could be refactored to deal with just one or the other. This would be nice because would split the 2000+ line spec file in two, making it a little easier to work with. Also add new tests for some of the new connect options. (I personally need to learn how to run the new test coverage tools so I can see what's not covered.)

[timdorr]

I already updated the code linting (#461), so that's taken care of. I intentionally didn't use airbnb because I didn't want to change styles just for the sake of changing styles.

Flow and Typescript typings both have PRs open (#389 and #433) respectively. They have atrophied, but I'm not a user of either typing system, so I can't really champion either effort. That has to come from the community.

[timdorr]

If you want to update the API.md with some initial changes or documentation placeholders, I can collaborate with you on that to put it over the finish line. That's really the key thing needed to get to 5.0.0 final.

[jimbolla]

react-redux v5 release notes (WIP)

TL;DR

• Backwards compatible API
• Major internal changes
• Significant performance improvements in common usage patterns
• Bugs fixed
• Additional features added to connect()
• New connectAdvanced() API

API Compatibility

Version 5.0 maintains API compatibility with v4.x but due to major internal changes, we felt a major version bump was warranted. Store state change notifications sent to components are now guaranteed to occur top-down, so if your code may behave differently if it relied on notifications happening out of order.

Internal Changes

Internally, the code for connect has been rewritten from the ground-up to be more modular, with the intention of greater maintainability and extensibility. This has also led to some new features and performance improvements.

Performance improvements

Significant performance gains were achieved by avoiding extra calls to setState() and render() by ensuring the order of change notifications to occur top-down, matching React's natural flow. Performance tests and benchmarks are discussed in #416.

Bugfixes

Some bugs/issues are resolved, related to performance loss and also impure components not re-rendering.

New features added to connect()

The behavior of connect() is now more customizable, by passing additional properties in the options arg. These will be described in the API docs.

New top level API: connectAdvanced()

The new implementation of connect() splits its behavior such that it is now a wrapper around a more-generalized connectAdvanced(). This connectAdvanced() method can be called directly if you have extreme performance needs or want to craft an API different than that of connect(). This will be described in the API docs.

[jimbolla]

There's a start for the release notes. I'll start on the api.md and submit that as another PR once I have something substantial.

[markerikson]

It'd be nice to get the API docs more "official"-looking. At the moment, they're just buried in the repo, which is not terribly obvious. Can we Gitbook-ify them, publish them, and also add a pointer from the Redux docs to the React-Redux docs?

[jimbolla]

I'm unfamiliar with Gitbook... what does that conversion entail?

[timdorr]

I think we can just reorganize the Readme a bit. A gitbook isn't really needed for only a couple pages of docs. The main Redux docs cover usage info for this repo anyways. We're better off leaving this one to just the basics.

[markerikson]

Okay. Can we at least stick some specific shorter "manual" <a> tags in there, so that it's possible to link directly to one of the API descriptions without having a hash anchor that's longer than the API description? :)

[jimbolla]

I started updating docs here, but ran out of time tonight.

[jimbolla]

There's an ok start to the docs update in PR #480. Would love some CC.

[jimbolla]

@markerikson Can you give me an example of what to add in there for manual tags and I'll update the docs this weekend?

@timdorr Thoughts on adding the beta release to the github releases tab?

[markerikson]

@jimbolla : You can stick HTML straight into Markdown, so what I did was insert <a> tags right before each appropriate section header. I gave each anchor a custom relevant shorter name, as opposed to the long auto-generated names from the slugified header text:

<a id="general-only-react"></a>
### Can Redux only be used with React?

[jimbolla]

@markerikson I threw some a tags in PR #480

[timdorr]

Sorry I've been captain lazypants on this stuff. I hope to get to some of it in the next few days (namely another beta release).

[jimbolla]

@timdorr It's all good. I appreciate that everyone has their own things going on. I just want to make sure this doesn't get lost.