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2026-02-12 Frontend Working Group Meeting Notes: The Alias Saga, frontend-base status

2026-02-12 Frontend Working Group Meeting Notes: The Alias Saga, frontend-base status

Please be advised: Frontend Working Group meetings are recorded and transcribed.

 Time, location

 Agenda

  • @Brian Smith frontend-component-footer package lock regens

  • @Adolfo Brandes Checking up on recent CC onboardings

  • @Adolfo Brandes React-query and frontend-base status updates: anybody blocked?

  • @Adolfo Brandes Concluding the alias saga (aka, transpilation before publication): publishing PR artifacts

📝Notes

  • If anybody can review/merge some of these, it would be awesome:

    • Or just a “will merge on a rebase” approval

 Decisions

  1. We will go ahead with Typescript transpilation before publication
  2. We will update app package exports to include more than just the basics

 Action items

@Adolfo Brandes to help Brian with the frontend-component-footer reviews/merges
@Adolfo Brandes will follow up with Javier on CC merge rights
@Brian Smith and @Adolfo Brandes to check in with Axim engineering on what’s the best approach for publishing PR artifacts

Previous action items

🎥Recording

 Participants

Adolfo Brandes, Brian Smith, Diana Villalvazo Salas, Jacobo Dominguez, Javier Ontiveros, Jesse Stewart-WGU, Jesus Balderrama, Max Frank, Sarina Canelake, tony busa

🤖 Summary

This meeting of the Frontend Working Group covered status updates on major refactoring efforts and a long discussion about developer experience, specifically around module resolution and testing PRs.Key Discussion Points

Personal & Administrative Items

  • Package Lock Regenerations: Brian Smith requested team members review and approve his pull requests related to regenerating package locks across repositories following a frontend component change.

  • Meeting Template: Adolfo Brandes introduced a new meeting notes template that moves action items to the top for better accountability.

  • Core Contributor Status: Adolfo noted that Javier Ontiveros still needs to sign a core contributor document to gain merge rights. Jacobo Dominguez confirmed he has his merge rights.

React Query & Frontend Base Status Updates

  • React Query PRs: Jesus Balderrama confirmed his React Query pull request had all comments addressed, though more tests are needed. Jacobo Dominguez's related PR, which includes cleanup commits, is ready for another review.

  • Login Redirection Issue: Jesus identified a high-priority issue where the frontend-base app does not redirect a logged-out user to the login page when accessing the dashboard URL, leading to a blank page. He is preparing a PR with a fix.

  • React Context Optimization: The group discussed using React.useReducer (as Jacobo implemented) instead of many useState hooks to prevent huge dependency arrays and improve performance by reducing unnecessary re-rendering, a change Jesus also confirmed he has made.

The "Alias Saga" (Transpilation and PR Artifacts)

This segment focused on overcoming an issue where using source aliases (e.g., @source) and publishing regular JavaScript broke the ability for developers to test PRs on local sites by referencing a GitHub branch URL in package.json.

  • Source Alias Fix (Transpilation):

    • The team decided to compile TypeScript to JavaScript before publishing for all apps, similar to the change already merged for frontend-base.

    • The compilation process uses a TSC alias tool to replace the aliases with relative paths in the compiled JavaScript.

    • Adolfo proposed to merge the build/transpilation changes first.

  • PR Artifact Distribution:

    • Problem: The transpilation change prevents direct testing via a GitHub branch URL.

    • Adolfo's Proposed Solution: A CI workflow to upload a package tarball (via npm unpack), then create a temporary GitHub pre-release with the tarball URL to bypass the GitHub artifact zip limitation. This requires a separate cleanup workflow to delete the pre-release when the PR is closed.

    • Alternative Ideas: Brian Smith suggested it would be simpler for reviewers to just download the zipped artifact, unzip it, and install it locally as a file. They also discussed using a dedicated GitHub app (like package-pr-new) or a GitHub Packages feature to automate and simplify the tarball distribution without polluting the main releases page.

  • Next Steps on Exporting: Javier Ontiveros noted that with the new modern export syntax, the package.json files must be updated to explicitly export all intended public components (like main.css, routes, etc.) so that consuming applications can access and reconfigure them. This will be a follow-up task.