Angular Roadmap & stay up to date

[FVilli]

This project is really interesting, and the approach is absolutely right! But Angular is evolving fast, and version 21 will be out soon! How do you plan to stay up to date with the latest Angular releases? At the moment, this library is still on Angular 19, right?

(I have done a search for this topic)

[goetzrobin]

Hey @FVilli the team currently things that after v1 our strategy is to support the latest 2 major versions. Which means it will take 6 months until we can adopt the latest innovations from the framework, but also gives team 1 year of support.

There is a PR to upgrade the project to Angular 20, that is about to be merged: #1002

Does this help. Would you like to see this documented on spartan.ng also?

[FVilli]

Great! But I’d recommend trying to stay on top of things — meaning, set yourselves the goal of adopting the latest version in half the time, around 3 months. When Angular releases a new version, you should aim to release a beta for that version right away (which basically means starting work during Angular’s own beta phase), and have it finalized within 3 months.

This way, you avoid constantly lagging behind — because if using spartan-ui means never being on the latest Angular version, that could become a significant deterrent.

I absolutely understand it’s easy to say from the outside and that you’re already doing a great job, but staying up to date is really essential.

Personally, for example, I’d really like to use spartan-ui, but I’m not willing to work with Angular version 19 — especially considering that version 21 will be released in just a few days.

[ashley-hunter]

I think there is perhaps a slight misunderstanding here - us running v19 does not mean that you have to use v19. The Angular library builds are forwards compatible, but not backwards compatible, so if we build with v19 this means that people use v19 or greater can use this within their applications just fine.

However if we build with v20, then we cannot guarantee support for v19. So we are extending support for those not able to update - while not blocking those who want to use the latest and greatest. This also aligns well with how Angular handles their deprecation process where if an API is going to be removed, it is deprecated in one release and removed in the subsequent release which allows us to support any two major versions at a time without issue.

Sure this means we perhaps can't use some of the very latest APIs in our code right away, but that doesn't tend to be too much of an issue and again, this doesn't prevent you from using them.

Its a balance, we want to keep the project up to date, while also not frustrating people who perhaps can't update every 6 months right away, and this approach so far has been a reasonable compromise.

As Robin said, we have a pull request ready to go to update our tooling to Angular 20, so as soon as Angular 21 is released, you'll be able to use it right away 😊