Release Planning for Next Major Version

[Darryl Pogue <da...@dpogue.ca>]

Hi folks,

In the Hangouts meeting earlier this week, we discussed the effort of
continuing to do bugfix releases of existing release branches compared
to the much larger effort of our roadmap for the next major. The
suggestion was that we should make a major release now, which serves
primarily just to drop node 4 support with almost no other changes,
and then continue on the roadmap items for a future major version.
Essentially, don't get too attached to the concept of a major version
having a bunch of new features ("romantic versioning"), and bump it
because dropping node 4 is considered to be a breaking change
("semantic versioning").

With that in mind, and a bunch of work already in progress, this email
hopes to summarize what work has already been done on master on
various repos and is ready for release, what work is in-progress and
makes sense to include in this next major, and what work would be nice
to complete but not required for this major.

Everything else will get bumped to the next next major, which will
include some larger refactorings.



Next Major
----------

Ideally we're aiming to have this sometime in the early fall, after
iOS 12 is released.

This is hopefully only a "major" version in the sense that it drop
support for Node 4, and doesn't contain any changes that require
updates for end users.

Done
====
* Remove usage of cordova-registry-mapper from tooling
* Remove all old `--no-fetch` code
* Refactor the cordova-fetch code to improve performance
* iOS: Fix for automatic provisioning

In Progress
===========
* Drop node 4 support from all repos
* Drop committed node_modules from all platform repos
* iOS: Improved Swift support
* iOS: Bridge WebView plugin for WKWebView transition
* Android: Adaptive Icons support
* Update the Hello Cordova starter to work with WKWebView & safe areas

To Do
=====
* Commit package-lock.json in repos
* iOS: Fix CocoaPods support for Xcode 10
* iOS: Anything required for iOS 12 support
* Android: Bring whitelist in-platform



Next Next Major
---------------

This is where the more ambitious ideas go.

In Progress
===========
* Try to drop our Q dependency in favour of native promises
* Splitting platform-specific ConfigParser code out of cordova-common
* iOS: Bring Splashscreen plugin in-platform

To Do
=====
* Drop `--browserify` flag from tooling
* Refactor the platform add flow
* Add a `cordova install` command
* Android: Ensure Kotlin support
* Android: Bring SplashScreen plugin in-platform
* iOS: Use LaunchStoryboards in newly generated project
* iOS: Compatibility with Xcode new build system
* Windows: Drop support for Windows 8.1


If you see anything here that is a concern, that I've forgotten to
include, or that you think is too ambitious for the next small major
version, please let me know!

~Darryl

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