Bring the boilerplate-card to a modern version

[elmar-hinz]

I don't get it. Cards are such an important part of Home Assistant!

But it looks like Home Assistant is not interested in helping users to build cards. To official documentation is not very verbose in this topic. Instead it points to user to this boilerplate card. If you follow the README, it doesn't even work, because it is outdated and not well maintained.

The learning curve of the boilerplate card is steep. On top of JS you have to learn typescript. Obviously most users give up here. There aren't even a lot of issues or pull requests. This is a real stopper for the whole Home Assistant project.

You can get the code running by using yarn.lock. This isn't even mentioned in the README. A plain npm install will run you into trouble. If you use yarn.lock you are nailed down to very old versions. There is no fun in this.

I tried to update all modules to the latest packages applying the npm-check-updates tool. Done this, I ran into a strange mixture of import and require statements within the rollup configuration. In the head imports are used. They break due to missing .js endings. In line 36 require is used within a closure. And so on ...

Likely the older versions are a little more tolerant. Once updated to the latest versions, it all breaks down. Something has to be changed to enable the users of Home Assistant to build their own cards.

Now you may say, send your own pull requests. I really tried. If everything is messed up that much with outdated versions, there isn't any point to start at all. I finally closed my pull requests, as there was always some update required to do before.

As long as the template is nailed down to a certain historical setup, any progress is impossible. You can't even expect ppl to send pull requests. So please bring this template into a contemporary state, to get things started again.

[elmar-hinz]

Digging deeper into this. Running the latest versions of the modules requires nodejs >= 14.x.x

The development container is ludeeus/container/monster. It is running node 12.15.0-r1.

The latest conatainer creation by ludeeus was three years ago. Getting a recent development environment for cards requires getting a new container first or at least some update of nodejs inside the old one.