Roadmap for addons

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

We should make using addons less confusing for the users.

Describe the solution you’d like

I suggest the following roadmap:

• Make alias three/addons/, pointing to three/examples/jsm/ (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/23406),
• Change the documentation to use word “addons” instead of “examples” and tell only about the alias (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/24579),
• Update manual (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/24888),
• Possibly update documentation paths,
• Move the fonts from examples/fonts, on which addons are dependant (if there are such? Not sure whether it is still the case) to examples/jsm.

After import maps would be supported by Safari and Firefox In the end of the year:

• Finally drop support for examples/js (https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/pull/25043),
• Move examples/jsm/ folder to the root of the repo and rename it to addons, making it less confusing for users reading the source code of the addons.

[donmccurdy]

Oops thanks, yeah. They aren’t CJS but are “UMD-like” enough that the usage can be:

// UMD
require('three/addons/loaders/GLTFLoader.js');
const loader = new THREE.GLTFLoader();

// ESM
import { GLTFLoader } from 'three/addons/loaders/GLTFLoader.js';
const loader = new GLTFLoader();

Though I’d vote for https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/issues/24593#issuecomment-1238550059. 😃

[Mugen87]

I think this issue can be closed now since the remaining open points don’t need to be changed, imo. Fonts can be kept in examples/fonts, updating the documentation does not work without breaking URLs and it’s also not realistic to move examples/jsm to addons/. This would break a lot of paths and URLs so this is not something we can do.