Remove abandoned Baler module

[Leland]

Purpose of this pull request

Magento's "early Alpha" bundling solution baler has not been under development since the release of Magento v2.3.4, 7 months ago – I propose it be removed from the "Advanced JavaScript bundling" page masthead.

• Because of the staleness of the repository, unresolved issues are cropping up
• Modern dependency versions pose issues with the module, and need to be manually downgraded and pinned
• The underlying M2 module does not support PHP 7.4, and is thus incompatible with Magento v2.4
• baler, in general, does not appear to have been tested whatsoever on modern Magento versions

I desperately hope development on baler is resuscitated. It's a fabulous tool, and better bundling is needed on Magento. But recommending a stale, broken, unsupported, and undeveloped approach – even in an "alpha testing" way – does not seem wise!

Magento's "Magento Tech Tips," a resource that provides performance advice for Commerce Cloud clients, links out to this page. Clients should not be seeing broken alpha software recommendations in the masthead. I've even had Commerce Cloud
support reps recommend I test out baler to improve performance on clients. Another no-no.

Also see my issue on the baler repo proper: magento/baler#70

Affected DevDocs pages

• https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.4/performance-best-practices/advanced-js-bundling.html
• https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.3/performance-best-practices/advanced-js-bundling.html

Links to Magento source code

• https://github.com/magento/baler
• https://github.com/magento/m2-baler

[devops-devdocs]

An admin must run tests on this PR before it can be merged.

[bdenham]

Check!

[meker12]

running tests

[ghost]

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[Leland]

Fastest Magento merge ever. Thanks y'all 💌

[davidalger]

It might be good to remove the 'baler' references in the Lighthouse stack-pack that was added for Magento: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/lighthouse/pull/9797/files#diff-308b7b792d1ff34f5f1059de97567b43R1535-R1540

I'm thinking a link to the page on Advanced JS Bundling, MagePack, or perhaps just a link to the former (with an update to link to MagePack as a simpler means of going about achieving the bundling?)

What do you all think?

[meker12]

@davidalger That makes sense to me, but maybe better to ask the question in that repo. Adding @DrewML for his technical expertise.

[davidwindell]

Magepack is a great alternative for those looking.

[Leland]

@davidalger added an issue to the Lighthouse repo regarding that, if you want to add any thoughts about a replacement 🍻 GoogleChrome/lighthouse#11954

Have not had a chance to use Magepack, personally.