RN Support policy

[johnf]

What is the goal of which versions will be supported by this project?

Does it align with the RN policy of N+2? Or does it aim to go back further?

I'm happy to add a PR for the README once we know.

P.S. I love this project, I don't know how anyone could work out all the corner cases of what's required without it

[satya164]

The CLI only intends to support the latest React Native version during generation.

For the generated project, we ideally want it to support as many versions of React Native as possible and avoid making any changes that we know will break compatibility with older versions of React Native - unless there's a breaking change in the API for libraries in React Native that makes a change necessary without a backward compatible way.

We're still figuring out new architecture templates due to changes in codegen - and new architecture libraries are not intended to support versions older than 0.75 which made it default, but libraries built with the old architecture templates should work with RN 0.6x as well.

However, we're a small team, so we can't actively test against each version. So, we can't provide a support policy like the RN team. We welcome any PRs addressing backward compatibility even for older versions unless it's a big change.

[johnf]

@satya164 Thanks. That clarifies it perfectly!

I'm using builder-bob for https://github.com/oblador/react-native-vector-icons. I've integrated a test suite, react-test-app, which tests the build against older versions of RN and then uses react-native-owl to ensure the app works.

It's a bit broken at the moment, but once I have it working again,n I'd be happy to contribute it back here to be used against a simple app to ensure backward compatibility is maintained

[johnf]

@satya164 Somewhat related, has support for maintaining libraries that support both new and old architecture been dropped?

I notice only new and legacy templates now.

[satya164]

Yes, we have a lot of templates and it was getting hard to maintain.

According to React Native docs, you can have backward compatibility with includesGeneratedCode, so the need to have a complicated backward compatible template is a lot less. Though includesGeneratedCode seems to have a strong coupling to React Native version.

And once we verify that the templates work properly in the old architecture, we'll drop those templates as well. This will let us add more tests for existing templates by reducing the number of tests we're running.

https://reactnative.dev/docs/the-new-architecture/codegen-cli