Bootstrap Generator

[btford]

It'd be nice to have a separate generator for bootstrap. There are a few pending issues right now for Angular's generator related to bootstrap that I suspect are an issue in other generators.

The Bootstrap files will be fetched with bower, but it'd be nice to have something that lets you choose between different flavors like vanilla, font-awesome, sass, etc.

[sindresorhus]

👍

[addyosmani]

+1

[sindresorhus]

ping

[chicoxyzzy]

Why nobody here likes as flavor as LESS? That is very strange to have custom SASS version of Bootstrap but not to ship official version (at least as an option).

[sindresorhus]

Sass is more actively maintained and has a bigger community. We wanted to go with Stylus, but it's not there yet.

LESS was unmaintained when we started Yeoman. We didn't want to bet on it.

[chicoxyzzy]

@sindresorhus As I see LESS is not dead.
https://github.com/cloudhead/less.js/commits/master
Why not to give an option to choose official LESS Bootstrap version? Why does one should use a SASS port or compiled CSS version but not LESS?

[chicoxyzzy]

I believe that Ruby LESS compiler was unmantained but not LESS at all. It just switched to JS.

[sindresorhus]

As I see LESS is not dead.

Notice the word was. LESS (the JS version) was unmaintained for a long time. It had hundreds of open PRs and tickets and almost no activity. And it was buggy as hell.

Yeoman is highly opinionated and we provide what we think is the best. You are free to use whatever you want instead if you don't agree. This will be much simpler in Yeoman 1.0 too. npm install grunt-less && bower install bootstrap.

[chicoxyzzy]

Ok. Thanks for your answer. I am impressed by Yeoman. I am just too lazy to switch my projects to SASS and too lazy to start digging Yeoman's sources because I see a lot of things gonna change soon as 1.0 will be released.

[addyosmani]

@btford afaik this was addressed by https://github.com/yeoman/generator-bootstrap. Is there anything else pending here?

[btford]

Nope, we're good.

[tkrotoff]

Sorry to dig up this old issue, I'm interested here by the discussion the issue provoked.

@sindresorhus wrote "Sass is more actively maintained and has a bigger community. [...] LESS was unmaintained when we started Yeoman. We didn't want to bet on it."

• The original Bootstrap is written with LESS not Sass, I guess Bootstrap devs have good and valid reasons for that and I trust them over this choice.
• Using Sass means using a different Bootstrap flavor that can be more or less maintained, up to date, buggy, featured, compatible...
  Look at the issue "Use bootstrap 3": no official Sass version of Bootstrap 3 yet and each time a new version of Bootstrap is released you have to wait to get the equivalent Sass version => very frustrating.
• Speaking about "bigger community", here some stupid metrics:
  • LESS has 9,145 stars while Sass has 2,406 stars
  • StackOverflow trends are similar: http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/stack_overflow/tags/#!less+sass
  • Google trends gives LESS winner over Sass
• Most people don't care about using LESS or Sass, they want to use the original Bootstrap and LESS is just fine and does the job: they don't care about which one is marginally better than the other.
  If the original Bootstrap switches to Stylus one day, people will follow for the same reasons.

As of myself, I come from the Rails world where Sass is a first citizen (Sass compiler is written in Ruby while the LESS compiler is written in JavaScript). After using bootstrap-sass flavor since version 1.4, I got frustrated and one of the reason for me to switch to Yeoman/Bower is to use the original up to date Bootstrap.

[sindresorhus]

Nothing stopping you from using LESS, just plug in grunt-contrib-less and have fun. If we were to ever switch it would be Stylus, not LESS. More stars doesn't mean better. Bootstrap went with LESS since it was JS.

[tkrotoff]

1. You are looking for the best CSS preprocessor => Sass/Stylus/Whatever
2. Most are looking for the best Bootstrap experience => LESS

Ignoring the second category of people is IMHO stupid.

Most people don't care about using LESS or Sass, they want to use Bootstrap
[...] they don't care about which one is marginally better than the other

[SBoudrias]

@tkrotoff Like Sindre said, Yeoman only generate an app structure. Use whatever you need from there... You can even fork, or simply create your own generator on top of those already existing if you feel there's some major feature missing.

Or, send a PR to a generator your use with support for both SASS and LESS with a prompt question to let user choose... Whatever fits your need really. Feel free to contribute.

[sindresorhus]

Yeoman isn't just bootstrap. We create an opinionated workflow with the best tools (in our opinion ofc) working together. If it doesn't suite you it's easy to modify or just fork the generator to suite your needs :)

[tkrotoff]

@SBoudrias @sindresorhus of course I know all this

My comment was about supporting @chicoxyzzy

That is very strange to have custom SASS version of Bootstrap but not to ship official version (at least as an option)

It feels wrong that the main generators (webapp, angular, backbone, ember) all propose Bootstrap without the option to use the original LESS version for the reasons I have exposed earlier.

I guess the ideal solution would be that the generators ask for the preprocessor:

• No CSS preprocessor
• Sass
• LESS
• Stylus
• ...

and then ask for the inclusion of a CSS framework:

• No CSS framework
• Bootstrap (Sass or LESS version depending on preprocessor choice)
• Foundation (only available if Sass selected)
• Blueprint
• ...

(and then ask for the JS framework... one generator to rule them all by calling subgenerators :) )

And I know the answer to this: create your own generator...

[sindresorhus]

We're all thinking it, Bootstrap should switch to Stylus :p

But yes, we want to make stuff like this easier, but it's unfortunately very cumbersome atm to offer too many choices.