Re-export of Ratatui?

[atollk]

Hi. This is more of a question than an issue.

I noticed that Ratzilla reexports ratatui and all examples use ratzilla::ratatui instead of ratatui directly.

I'll be honest, this made me confused a lot about what Ratzilla actually is and how compatible it is to Ratatui. It took me proably an hour or so until I looked at the code to understand that it's just a reexport rather than some kind of manual wrapper. This is just some feedback, in case you're interested.

This also leads me to my question about what the purpose of that reexport is. Is the plan to replace the ratzilla::ratatui module by an actual custom implementation at some point?

[junkdog]

hi,

thanks for the feedack - we should probably clarify this in the docs somewhere.

the ratatui re-export exists so that users don't have to worry about keeping their ratatui dep in sync with the one ratzilla is built against. ratzilla wraps ratatui's Terminal and Backend traits among other things, so a version mismatch can lead to confusing compilation errors. using ratzilla::ratatui ensures you're working against the correct version.

that said, there's no plan to replace ratatui; ratzilla is a thin layer of browser glue and rendering logic built on top of ratatui.

[orhun]

Heya 👋🏼

Thanks for the issue. Adrian mostly answered this, but I want to also explain the original reason behind re-exporting ratatui here.
It's simply for the convenience of doing cargo add ratzilla and building a web app. I didn't want to confuse the user with other dependencies in Cargo.toml. But yeah, other way around is also confusing.

With that being said, my thoughts on this changed over time I think we should remove the re-export. Like you've expressed, it's more confusing than it is helpful at this point.

[atollk]

Thanks to both of you for the explanation :)

[orhun]

Thoughts on removing the re-export @junkdog ?

[junkdog]

Thoughts on removing the re-export @junkdog ?

thoughts on this changed over time

similarly, but my pendulum is swinging towards re-exporting, but i think (w/o actually looking) that i always import the ratatui dep.

mousefood dropped the ratatui re-export some time ago iirc. i think there's value in aligning the approach since both are under the ratatui umbrella.

what's our deprecation/breaking changes policy?

[orhun]

We're still pre 1.0 so it should be fine to do this in a minor bump I believe. It should be fine as long as we use the proper conventional commit and it will appear as breaking in the changelog. For documenting this further, we might want to create BREAKING-CHANGES.md document, similar to what Ratatui and Mousefood is doing.

[junkdog]

sounds good. we could also deprecate the re-export for a version.