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In my case, the main pain points were third-party packages, more than React 16 itself. For react you only had prop-types and createClass to change everywhere. The migration of react-router in particular was awful, the new react-router is so different from the old one they should have created another repository for the new version.

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This has been my experience of react-router since its inception. When react-router does a major API version bump, they really mean it. I don't use it in any projects I have full control over, but unfortunately due to its popularity in larger projects I've had to use it.

Agreed! After being burned by React-Router, more than once, I actually would opt for manually implementing a Redux-et-all solution with something like History.js over using React-Router again. Which is pretty worrying considering how important routing is, or should be, in the ecosystem.

They are maintaining two branches. The 3.x branch has the same API as 2.x and works with React 16.

That's good to know. React Router is the only thing stopping me from updating to React 16. I can't find an NPM package, so assume you need to point it at Github?

Just set the “react-router” entry in packages.json to “^3.0.0”

You can do:

    npm install --save react-router@3

which will add "react-router": "^3.2.0" to your package.json.

Completely agree. The new react router is a massive step back in the same code base. Rewriting apps in the new version is a massive pain.

That is true, but the new react-router makes better use of the component hierarchy which is the real beauty of React IMHO, by having the route components render conditionally based on the url.

We had a lot of pain doing this rewrite ourselves, but I must say it was worth it in the end.

Unfortunately, this is major version 4, so who is to say that the repo maintainers don't find an even better way to do it in six months, prompting a version 5 and so on...

React Router maintainer here!

The only things we're looking at for another major version are some changes to the default API behaviors (making `exact` default to true, for instance). There are potentially some changes to path matching, but that's being driven by path-to-regexp, not our own development.

Yes, 4.0 was a big change, but a necessary one. Now that we're in a great place, we plan on keeping things relatively stable indefinitely. Pencils down, as it were. Outside of some major upstream change with React itself, future versions will be more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Happy react router user here, at various major versions. Thanks for the great work!

> Yes, 4.0 was a big change, but a necessary one. Now that we're in a great place, we plan on keeping things relatively stable indefinitely.

Out of curiosity, was this also the thinking when 3.x was released?

Or when 3.x was released was there more of a philosophy that the problem space was still being explored, and major design changes were still possible and acceptable?

3.0 just removed deprecated features from 2.0. There were a handful of other tiny things, but a pretty bland major release otherwise.

Sure, but whether or not 3.x changed significantly from 2.x isn't really what I'm asking about, I was more wondering if you imagined upon the release of 3 (or 2 for that matter) that it was more or less the final stable overall design, or were significant future redesigns/rewrites still in the plan at that point?

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