[discussion] clean imports to replace `rxjs/add/observable/xyz`

Now that lettable operators are coming (#2667) to get rid of the import 'rxjs/add/operator/xyz' mess, the static Observable methods for creation (of, timer, …) and composition (merge, zip, …) will probably need the same treatment to get rid of import 'rxjs/add/observable/xyz'.

I didn’t find any issue or PR for this (probably not in scope of #2667, judging by the title and current commits), but I’m sure @benlesh has some ideas already?

It already seems to be possible to import these static methods properly using import { merge } from 'rxjs/observable/merge' etc, although this is not documented in the installation section of the docs. However, if I didn’t miss anything this approach seems quite clunky because

1. each method requires a separate import statement
2. the imports are not available on one central object like they are on Observable when using the add/observable imports
3. resulting from 2, they may need to be aliased because e.g. merge is a very generic name that does not convey correlation with RxJS

My personal comments on this: 1 could be resolved by centralizing the exports of the static methods similar to the rxjs/operators from #2667 2 does not appear to have an obvious solution, unfortunately there is no import { merge, zip } as ObservableFactoryThingy unless you’re importing everything (*) 3 is probably not a large problem, especially since the same thing will apply for lettable operators (map, min etc). I certainly don’t think it justifies exporting them as observableOf, mergeObservables etc instead. Either way, a possible solution to 2 might resolve 3 as well.

[benlesh]

FWIW: There has always been the ability to import these directly via:

import { of } from 'rxjs/observable/of';
import { fromEvent } from 'rxjs/observable/fromEvent';
import { timer } from 'rxjs/observable/timer';

The only noteworthy exceptions are throw and if, which are exported with underscores because of keyword collisions:

import { _if } from 'rxjs/observable/if';
import [ _throw } from 'rxjs/observable/throw';

[lock[bot]]

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