3.0 RFC/epic: Drop support for IE11, Ember <2.4, and more

[mixonic]

Motivation

There are several costs to ember-table supporting legacy platforms, and we're ready for a major release.

• Contributors keep stumbling on the legacy use of sendAction in this codebase (most recently at add columns array to onReorder() and onResize() #818). Today we cannot remove sendAction since it is required for Ember 1.12 and this library supports Ember 1.12.
• Additionally this library supports IE11 despite that browser being extremely uncommon in modern usage. Indeed at Addepar we no longer have a need to support IE11, and I think we're one of the last.
• We want to land Add horizontal scroll indicator feature #814, but may require a breaking change to the DOM (a new <div>)
• We want to drop support for legacy Node, < v10
• As part of an effort to update the ember-cli-sass version used here and elsewhere we make changes in Drop the legacy style build steps addepar-style-toolbox#38 which may alter how the SASS of an application works (no longer would an example app have a patched @import to import only once, instead an application should provide that functionality itself if desired).

The plan & progress

The repo now has a branch 3.0-beta, in draft state at #831. We will land patches for an eventual 3.0 release into that branch, and will make incremental beta releases along the way. Already you can find v3.0.0-4 released via NPM.

I propose a list of changes before a 3.0 final is declared. The task list is:

• Drop Ember < 2.4 from ember-try.js https://github.com/Addepar/ember-table/blob/master/config/ember-try.js#L13
• Drop usage of sendAction, instead call passed-in functions directly. Basically avoid sendAction when possible #825 but only the non-Ember-1.13 codepaths. Deprecations/send action #801 Remove sendAction API #860 should be able to be closed.
• Drop support for IE11 in https://github.com/html-next/vertical-collection (as audited by @twokul and @mixonic on 2020-12-22 we consider this done)
• Drop support for IE11 in this repo (for example

  ember-table/addon/-private/sticky/legacy-sticky-polyfill.js

  Line 4 in 70d0960

  These functions polyfill our usage of position: sticky; in IE11. They are not a general

  )
• Land Add horizontal scroll indicator feature #814 into the 3.0 branch
• Drop support for legacy Node in the package.json
• Land & release vertical-collection 2.0 Kick off 2.0-beta html-next/vertical-collection#321
• Release ember-raf-scheduler@0.2.0; Bump ember-raf-scheduler #870
• Bump ember-cli-sass
• Resolve any open 3.0 labeled issues or pull requests: Issues & PRs filtered here.
• Cut a major version of ember-table

[mixonic]

We've been discussing this with maintainers, and we intend to move forward on dropping IE11

[ghost]

see #800 for one conversation.

[mixonic]

We're moving forward with this! I'm updating the issue description with more details on the execution and plan.

[mixonic]

Ok! So we kicked off this goal in April 2020, and after a very long year we're nearly ready to pull the trigger on a stable 3.0 release. @twokul @kpfefferle and @ahmacleod have been landing some excellent work into the beta releases.

Additionally in that time Addepar has removed our own requirement that ember-table continue to support Ember 2.4. We're interested in upping the minimum supported version of Ember to 2.8.3.

Is there feedback from repo watchers on this step? If there is little in the way of feedback, we're inclined to bump the baseline and hope that helps our 3.x release cycle last a little bit longer.

[twokul]

I would strongly support 2.8 😄