Should package management be a part of this story?

[addyosmani]

• Encouraging use of a bower.json
• Optionally adding Polymer/Platform from Bower
• Quick description of how to publish your component to Bower

[zenorocha]

Yeah I have this dilemma.

From my experience creating boilerplates, the amount of people who uses a boilerplate is inversely proportional to the amount of dependencies you introduce to them. And I think one of the reasons why people keep creating elements everyday using this boilerplate is because there's absolutely no dependency.

But at the same time, we want to encourage best practices and Bower is a great solution when you need to use third-party elements.

IMHO these two approaches can lead to different results:

• If we keep the way it is right now, we'll have more new elements.
• If we add Bower as a dependency, we'll have more apps using these elements.

My conclusion is that since Polymer/X-tags aren't stable yet, maybe we should encourage people to create new elements and get used to this way of development instead of encourage them to use other's people elements. Once they go stable, we can add Bower in the boilerplate and create issues on the existing elements asking them to start using it.

Does it make sense to you?

[addyosmani]

I agree with your concerns.

My take on this was: right now it's really exciting to create elements and the quickest way to re-use those created by others is often just to install them using Bower. You can of course just clone/download the repo, but there's uncertainty about what version of Polymer or the polyfills you need and things get hairy fast (this is just my experience).

We could:

1. Include a three line boilerplate in the readme that lets you fill out the name of your package on Bower (but also say, you can remove this block if you want) and maybe a bower.json file.
2. Punt on any package management messaging at all.

I feel that 2 favors the complete beginner because they don't have to understand about dependency management at all, but 1. favors the developer that cares about creating re-usable components. I think both use-cases are valid but we need to figure out a sweet spot.

Maybe we just mention the Bower install template in readme but don't give you a bower.json? I imagine most people that know what Bower is are aware of bower init etc.

[zenorocha]

Closed at: webcomponents/element-boilerplate@0d53cdb