FYI: removal of CoffeeScript from edx-platform

[Andy Armstrong]

As a hackathon project last week, we started the process of removing CoffeeScript from edx-platform. Last year we formally announced that we were deprecating CoffeeScript, and so now we are following through to simplify life for front end developers.

If you are interested in the process that we are using, it is documented on the wiki here:

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/OPEN/How+to+convert+CoffeeScript+to+JavaScript

There are a couple of important ramifications of this work:

1. Changes you make to CoffeeScript files will be hard to merge back, as the files are being deleted in favor of their JavaScript versions.

2. The history of changes will be lost as GitHub sees the JavaScript versions as being new files.

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks,

 - Andy

--

Andy Armstrong

edX | UI Architect  | an...@edx.org  

141 Portland Street, 9th floor

Cambridge, MA 02139

http://www.edx.org

[Andy Armstrong]

After some discussion we decided that it made sense to preserve the Git history as we make this transition. I've updated the wiki to describe the revised steps that will take this into account.

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/OPEN/How+to+convert+CoffeeScript+to+JavaScript

Thanks,

 - Andy

[Andy Armstrong]

Another thing to note: when you switch from an old branch, you may wind up with generated JavaScript files living in the old coffee directories. This can cause problems for tests that load files via wildcards. We recommend using the following command to remove any such generated files:

    git clean -fdx

See the manual page for more details: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clean

Thanks,

 - Andy