[Umbrella] Brave-UI: Split cross-functional publishing

[petemill]

Brave-UI contains WebUI implementations across features, not just core components. It also has a single brave-core release branch targets.

Problem

Whilst we have brave-core specific release branches in brave-ui relating to brave-core this is still a lot of overhead that slows development down. It also creates a dependency timing issue whereby features are merged to master (or other release branch) in brave-ui but need some corresponding change in brave-core. It can get pretty complex, when we can avoid all that thought and time completely with one of the solutions below.

Aims

• Feature A can have some items in brave-core 58.x branch and other items in brave-core 59.x branch
• Feature B can have some items in brave-core 58.x branch and other items in brave-core 59.x branch, separately to feature A
• Brave-ui can have some items in brave-core 58.x branch and other items in brave-core 59.x branch

Nothing UI-related gets merged to brave-core master / branch before it's corresponding brave-core changes are.

Solutions

1

Keep everything in brave-ui github repo, and publish to multiple npm targets, e.g:
@brave/ui
@brave/ui-feature-sync
@brave/ui-feature-rewards-panel
@brave-ui-feature-rewards-settings

Questions

• How do we do branching for each feature separately?
• Uplift process for feature A and B?
  Not really that relevant anymore now that brave-ui features are not published to npm

2

Keep brave-ui as core components, move features in to feature repos. In other words, brave-core related features go in to brave-core repo.

• brave-core/components/web-ui
  • features (for now, but probably folded in to actual components)
• brave-core/components/web-ui
  • stories
• brave-core gets npm run web-ui-storybook

Tracking

• Create brave-core storybook Initial hot reloading / preview for webui within brave-core #2518
• Move NTP New Tab Page: move components from brave-ui to brave-core #5178
• Move Sync Sync: move components from brave-ui to brave-core #5198
• Move Welcome Page Welcome Page: move components from brave-ui to brave-core #5216
• Move Shields Shields: move components from brave-ui to brave-core #5505
• Move Rewards Brave rewards ui brave-core#3463
• Optional: enable hot reloading inside webui in dev environment?!

[petemill]

What is blocking us put the actual brave-core specific webui in to it?

Primary goals

• Some kind of hot-reloading experience (inside the browser or inside a separate local website)

Secondary goals

• Develop UI without building the browser (even with hot-reloading)
• Some kind of storybook deployment to show other teams UI on a website instead of having to run the internal pages in a browser build

All the goals seem to be solved with just adding a storybook to brave-core. The one disadvantage being that for that to work we would still need a separate layer that mocks / provides the chrome.* internal APIs (and any other data / actions). But that is what we do anyway whilst also adding the complexity of it being in a whole separate repo with cross-feature contamination too.

[petemill]

Updated description for up to date problem description and aims

[szaimen]

Any updates here?

[cezaraugusto]

Since #5198 is now in master, I'm happy to announce that we hit the goal of moving feature-specific components to brave-core. Closing this.