Use Babel 7 & Webpack3 (via blocks)

[zcei]

Umbrella: #1333

• Gets Babel into play, so that ESM is working
• Upgrades Webpack to v3 and uses an abstraction layer that simplifies config creation.

[zcei]

The PR Karma with Webpack config (see #1333 for details on order of PRs) will fix the test setup. Currently the provided config is incompatible with Webpack, but for overview purposes the PR for changing Karma is split up to its own PR

[montogeek]

Why webpack-block is used?

[zcei]

Webpack's configuration object is a low-level format, that nearly no-one grasps fully. Therefore it's error prone and not easily to relate single lines to the functionality it should enable.

Therefore a composable higher-level abstraction was chosen, that makes obvious what shall be achieved, which can get expanded to the verbose lower-level syntax.

[montogeek]

I am worried that new contributors would need to learn an abstraction to make a new change, on the hand, since this is related on how the library is build and distributed I don't think it would change a lot.
Cool abstraction!

[zcei]

Indeed. But given the fact what it takes to learn configuring Webpack properly (also in its different versions) and how often there's a need to change this config later (very few) the readability was my main driver.
Even when you don't know the library, reading it gives you a pretty clear idea on what's going on (of course that's only my opinion 🙂 )

[axe312ger]

Yep I agree here:

• the readability is definitely better as a common webpack config.
• the values itself do not really differ, doing changes is basically no real efford
• we will probably not change these settings at all in the close future (webpack 4 maybe by removing some stuff which is hopefully then part of the config defaults)

[Khaledgarbaya]

two small comments

[Khaledgarbaya]

Do we need this here?

[zcei]

It was just wrongly sorted in the package.json beforehand. The dev dependency can be removed in the Karma branch, as until then the karma config has a dependency on the Webpack dev server

[axe312ger]

Yes to make the tests run in this PR, will get removed later on

[Khaledgarbaya]

I don't see this used here, or was it there before ?

[zcei]

It's just the comma, as pkginfo was added 😂

[axe312ger]

In the utils for now, later on we might get rid of it when moving to lodash

[Khaledgarbaya]

LGTM