React team plans for library migration support?

[markerikson]

Per the Plan for React 18 blog post and other discussion, the React team's goal is to "to prepare the ecosystem for a smooth, gradual adoption of React 18 by existing applications and libraries". Based on that and the discussions so far, it's clear that many libraries will need to undergo compat testing and potential updates to make sure everything works okay.

I'm curious what plans the React team has to help support that work in the community, beyond the discussions in this forum. I can picture several possible support approaches:

• Documenting specific known compatibility issues seen when upgrading apps to React 18
• Documenting common React usage patterns that are likely to result in compat issues
• Providing test cases, lint rules, or codemods that help identify / fix problems
• Further documentation on React 18-specific APIs and behavior changes
• Being available for Q&A / "tech support" sessions where maintainers can bring up questions on specific problems we've seen trying to migrate
• Participating in design / implementation discussions as libraries work to upgrade
• Actively helping implement upgrades to libraries

Any thoughts on which if any of these approaches the React team is thinking of doing?

[rickhanlonii]

Hey @markerikson, thanks for the question.

tl;dr: We will be working closely with library maintainers to add support for concurrent features over the coming months. We're planning on doing a combination of of all these suggestions through the working group.

The first step is to explain what work we see needs to be done at a high level, so we're working on a workgroup post that will be a "Concurrent rendering for library maintainers" guide, and documentation for new APIs libraries will use to support concurrent features. Those docs will be a "kick off" for starting library support. After they're published, we'll do a Q&A / support session, and use the working group to document questions, use cases, patterns, design, etc.

I know we're all really excited to start with the work of adding support to libraries, so I'm sorry it's taking so long. We've spent the last couple weeks kicking off the release (which focused on the gradual adoption strategy), and now we're transitioning to working with libraries to support the new concurrent features.

We expect this work to take months, not weeks, similar to how the hooks release went.

Thanks for your patience as we line everything up in order!

[gaearon]

I'll follow up that this was later answered in #70.