Plan for CLI in Q1 - umbrella issue

Hey,

Together with the CLI team, we have been discussing the next steps as far as the development. The overall conclusion was that before we start discussing about the feature, we want to focus on cleaning up the codebase from the legacy features, so that it is easier for everyone to get involved in the library development.

If you would like to help with the following work at any stage, either as a contributor or just a reviewer/advisor, please let me know! You can do that by writing a comment in this issue or contacting me directly on RNC Discord.

With that in mind, I have prepared the following action plan, which is divided into weeks:

• 1. Review and merge outstanding PRs [17.01 - 21.01] https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/pulls

Before starting a complex rewrite, it would be great to take a final look at the outstanding PRs and merge/resolve as much of them as possible to avoid unnecessary rebasing later on. It is going to be a great way to refresh the knowledge of the codebase.

• 2. Re-apply work from next [24.01 - 28.01]

Previously, link has already been removed under next branch and started a wider refactor of the CLI. Unfortunately, the work was 70% done and never completed. The branch is now impossible to merge due to complex conflicts. It will be easier to re-apply it manually.

The mistake was that each PR was “self-contained” and was ready to ship. Instead of making a new branch and repeating the same mistakes, I am going to send the PRs directly against our main branch.

The main PR is https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/pull/790, which removes link (along few other commands) as well as cleans up the configuration itself. This PR is going to clean up a larger part of the codebase.

Smaller PRs that were submitted (status to be verified, they might have been done in a different form already):

• https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/pull/811
• https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/pull/812
• https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/pull/843
• https://github.com/react-native-community/cli/pull/859

While this is not going to complete the “clean-up” entirely, it is going to set a foundation for further work.

• 3. Release a beta version with link removed (and codebase cleaned-up) [31.01 - 04.02]

Once all PRs are done, we’re going to release a beta version of the new CLI, without the aforementioned pieces. In the optimistic scenario, this is going to be a transparent change, since most of the things were already deprecated. Unfortunately, it may turn out that certain things were removed (or are going to be removed without prior deprecation warning - as long as we have an agreement in a PR to do so). In that case, we will annotate such a breaking change and bump version number accordingly.

1. Planning meeting to discuss the plan for the CLI in 2022 [07.02 - 11.02]

Once we have a beta version out there in the wild, I would like to focus on defining the strategy for the CLI in the entire 2022. This is going to be an interesting discussion and I don’t expect this to finish during that week. I don’t want to focus exclusively on fixing reported issues, but think on what we can do to make the overall DX with React Native better.

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If you have any suggestions, please feel free to share your thoughts and make any improvements!

[thymikee]

@mikehardy should be safe 😃 Can’t wait to see the PR!

[grabbou]

#1537 is being merged today. We will follow-up with an alpha release shortly. Meanwhile, I am going to merge an outstanding PR refactoring run-android and that should get us on the way for 8.x release.