Deprecate and remove Live Terminal
For guidance on the overall deprecations, removals and breaking changes workflow, please visit Breaking changes, deprecations, and removing features
Deprecation Summary
Live Preview is a feature of the Web IDE that allows you to compile some JavaScript projects in the browser and preview rendered changes to the code before committing and triggering a build.
However, the utility of the feature has been limited by the complex configuration steps, narrow requirements in the types of projects it supports, and hard dependency on a third party library. Currently, only the most basic HTML projects can even be successfully configured for Live Preview and even our own engineers struggle to demonstrate the feature successfully.
Current usage is very low so impact to existing users is limited. While we don't have unique user counts we can infer that less than 0.01% of our active users will notice the feature is gone. For those that do rely on Live Preview, there is currently no alternative within the GitLab Web IDE, but they can use Review Apps for a slower, but similar, feedback loop.
Furthermore, an issue with the third party dependency (confidential issue) justifies an early removal, outside of a major release.
Breaking Change
While there is no immediate replacement for Live Preview in the Web IDE, we are working to introduce a more feature-rich Web IDE experience based on VS Code. With the beta of the new Web IDE, we will also be introducing an MVC for our Remote Development category that enables the Web IDE to connect to a remote host running an environment capable of compiling far more complex projects. Later iterations on this experience will ultimately provide more functionality than Live Preview ever did. For those without access to the infrastructure required to configure a remote development environment, there may be an opportunity to install third party extensions in the Web IDE to address these workflows.
Affected Topology
SaaS and Self-managed will be impacted by this change.
Affected Tier
Checklists
Labels
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This issue is labeled deprecation, and with the relevant ~devops::
,~group::
, and~Category:
labels. -
This issue is labeled breaking change if the removal of the deprecated item will be a breaking change.
Timeline
Please add links to the relevant merge requests.
- As soon as possible, but no later than the third milestone preceding the major release (for example, given the following release schedule:
14.8, 14.9, 14.10, 15.0
–14.8
is the third milestone preceding the major release):-
A deprecation announcement entry has been created so the deprecation will appear in release posts and on the general deprecation page. -
Documentation has been updated to mark the feature as deprecated.
-
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On or before the major milestone: A removal entry has been created so the removal will appear on the removals by milestones page and be announced in the release post. - On the major milestone:
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The deprecated item has been removed. -
If the removal of the deprecated item is a breaking change, the merge request is labeled breaking change.
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Mentions
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Your stage's stable counterparts have been @mentioned
on this issue. For example, Customer Support, Customer Success (Technical Account Manager), Product Marketing Manager.- To see who the stable counterparts are for a product team visit product categories
- If there is no stable counterpart listed for Sales/CS please mention
@timtams
- If there is no stable counterpart listed for Support please mention
@gitlab-com/support/managers
- If there is no stable counterpart listed for Marketing please mention
@cfoster3
- If there is no stable counterpart listed for Sales/CS please mention
- To see who the stable counterparts are for a product team visit product categories
-
Your GPM has been @mentioned
so that they are aware of planned deprecations. The goal is to have reviews happen at least two releases before the final removal of the feature or introduction of a breaking change.