Plugins to only support babel5

[spalger]

With the merge of #6177 Kibana plugins that don't use a "sync" style task to copy their source into installedPlugins will only be able to use babel 5.0 compatible .babelrc files.

/cc @rashidkpc @simianhacker @tsullivan @Bargs @kjbekkelund @w33ble

[Bargs]

Have we ever considered transpiling the Kibana server code ahead of time instead of using the Babel require hook? If we (and plugins) took that approach, plugins could use (or not use) any version of babel they like, no?

[kimjoar]

👍 We should probably use the same version of babel across plugins either way, so we don't end up with some strange edge cases. Hopefully we'll be able to upgrade Kibana to babel 6 soon too(?).

[tsullivan]

cc @lukasolson

@Bargs the only area that plugins really needed their own Babel setup is for the Gulpfile which runs sync, build, test, lint, etc. @spalger and I talked about not using Gulp for those, just have npm scripts running the executable that does the work. I'm good with that idea.

I don't see it as a significant benefit to allow plugins to choose their own version of Babel. It just complicates things.

I am 👍 as well

[kimjoar]

I need babel for unit tests. Running it using this npm script:

"test": "mocha --require ./test/setup.js --compilers js:babel-register 'public/**/__tests__/*.test.js*' 'test/**/*.js*'",

Nice not to have to copy lots of files around to run the unit tests. But that might of course become simpler with #6177, as I don't need to copy files around, so might be I can get away from babel entirely.

[spalger]

@Bargs that is a path I would love to explore more

[spalger]

might be I can get away from babel entirely.

That's the idea @kjbekkelund

[kimjoar]

How are we progressing towards Babel 6? What are the major blockers on an upgrade?

[spalger]

The main blocker is our mix of require() and import. As far as I know that's the only thing there is no workaround for right now

[w33ble]

The main blocker is our mix of require() and import. As far as I know that's the only thing there is no workaround for right now

Didn't you just move everything to import? Was that the last hold-up?

For reference, the issue for moving to babel 6 is #5822

[epixa]

I'm pretty sure this is a non-issue now, so I'm going to close.