Deprecate packages

[kestarumper]

Upcoming deprecation

We plan on deprecating the following packages in the upcoming v4 release:

• uniforms-material Deprecate uniforms-material theme #1338
• uniforms-bootstrap3 Deprecate uniforms-bootstrap3 package #1341
• uniforms-bridge-graphql Deprecate uniforms-bridge-graphql package #1322
• uniforms-bridge-simple-schema Deprecate uniforms-bridge-simple-schema package #1323

This means we will mark the packages as deprecated on NPM and remove them from the repository. Those pacakges can still be downloaded and used but we will not contribute to them.

Migration guide to uniforms v4 with deprecated themes will be included in the uniforms v4 documentation #1305.

Planned deprecation

• uniforms-bootstrap4 will be deprecated after a year.

Motivation

We will deprecate theme packages in a year after releasing the next version of the theme package that supports the new major version of the UI theme package.

E.g.

1. Bootstrap releases Bootstrap 6
2. We start working on uniforms-bootstrap6.
3. We release uniforms-bootstrap6 and then deprecate uniforms-bootstrap5 in a year

Maintaining old packages with backward compatibility is our main problem and does not scale well. We want to stay up to date with the newest theme integrations.

When it comes to the bridges, we identified the least popular ones and want to pay more attention to the other ones. There is a plan to focus on improving uniforms-bridge-zod.