[Feature] Have a special flag to enable experimental features

[zikaari]

I feel we're closer than ever before on getting CSS sourcemaps functional for which I've been working on CRA fork that so far holds up to issues caused by previous attempts at this problem (see #591 (review))

PR for which will be up very soon.

This PR will replace style-loader and new setup will handle things differently. Considering that as well as react-hot-loader or #2304 , these are clearly new windows to awesomeness and bugs.

So how about CRA published with new features (even unstable) included that can be enabled by passing flag to yarn start?

For example: yarn start --rhl --css-maps

Thoughts welcome

[zikaari]

This will allow larger community to get involved which means more bug reports = more patches = more stability.

Also getting CSS sourcemaps working (and included in CRA) is very critical for me because I'm working on a chrome devtools extension for React devs which leverages getResources API and I can't use this without sourcemaps.

[Timer]

We've recently developed a bot that releases pull requests.
I think this accomplishes what you'd like.

[viankakrisna]

So how about CRA published with new features (even unstable) included that can be enabled by passing flag to yarn start?

Problem is this would make the config files more complex with the addition of checks to the flag. The ejected setup would be harder for beginner to read.

Also, if the users relying on these flags and it turns out that CRA won't go further with experimental feature, they'll leave out without a non-upgradeable setup.

IMO the best way to go forward is to enhance forking experience. Filed one of ideas that can be done here #3088. @Timer can we have the renaming script you create for @react-scripts-dangerous? 😉

[Timer]

@viankakrisna repo is here: https://github.com/Timer/monorepo-contrib

@NeekSandhu I don't think we're going to be adding flags any time soon [as @viankakrisna said], and I believe @react-scripts-dangerous is the closest we'll get to a "experimental" version of CRA.

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If you submit a pull request that passes CI, a release will automatically be created for you that you can depend on until we merge your pull request (so you don't have to eject).

[Timer]

See an example of this here: #3145 (comment).

[zikaari]

@Timer I was aware of bot and have to say it's really awesome. But the main reason behind this issue and my previous PR #3163 was getting as many people (brains and eyes) as possible aware and involved* by bringing new things to forefront instead of being a dormant PR.

But again, I understand the disruption of design philosophies this will cause as stated by @viankakrisna

* bug reports, ideas, inspiration