Discuss: "bundling" terminology is confusing

[raulk]

The term "bundle" in modern Javascript land often implies things like packaging, minification, tree shaking, etc. all of which don't apply in our usage of the term. It evokes Webpack, Parcel, etc. I've received feedback from developers that this is confusing.

Really, what we are trying to recommend is putting libp2p imports and configuration in one file, and exporting it from there. Calling that a "bundle" is unnecessarily complex IMO.

Can we simplify this?

[raulk]

cc @Mikerah

[raulk]

I actually think it's great to point to real examples of libp2p node configurations like the ones in IPFS. Can we point to other projects too?

[raulk]

Alternatively we may want to bring in those examples into libp2p itself as "blueprints" or something.

[jacobheun]

This is a duplicate of #231.

It would be ideal to do a full audit of the readme and language used, including bundling. There is an open issue at #237.

[raulk]

@jacobheun gotcha, let's dislodge all this stuff! Should we create a dx label and group all these tasks and discussions so we can address them ASAP?

[jacobheun]

@raulk yes, let's group them at #308 which is to track the OKR around improved docs and examples. I'll comment there with links to each of the issues for js-libp2p itself and tag each of those with the new label.

[yusefnapora]

I agree that this is a confusing bit of terminology - we should either publish common "bundles" as npm packages, or just get rid of the term entirely and refer to "configuring libp2p" instead as suggested here.

[Mikerah]

I actually just got into this very issue a few days ago. I used the word bundle in the same paragraph both in the JS sense and libp2p sense. A suggestion I have would just to refer to them as libp2p modules or libp2p configurations.

[vasco-santos]

We got away of the bundle terminology on the latest release, as a consequence of it has been reported as confusing by several issues. Closing this as it is not relevant anymore