Just over a year ago we started a discussion about the future of the Problem Builder XBlock. The post highlights a bit of the history of the block and the challenges in continuing to maintain it.
Given that we currently don’t have the resources to continue maintaining it, nor any candidate for a new maintainer, we have initiated the deprecation process and posted a DEPR Issue.
In roughly one month, we will mark the block as deprecated; however, we will continue to maintain and ensure that the block continues to work for at least the upcoming Sumac release and the Teak release after that.
If you have any questions, or concerns, feel free to post them here or on the DEPR ticket.
We’ve decided to look into the possibility of creating a simplified version of the problem-builder block that retains some core features while removing lesser-used features. We’d hope to use this as a proving ground for the XBlock v2 proposal that Braden shared during the conference and help strengthen that approach by using a real-world example.
While we would have loved to continue on some of the feature of problem builder in the form of a new modern XBlock, we have not seen sufficient interest in sponsoring continued development. As such, we’ve decided to deprecate the XBlock without a replacement. The block is known to work in Sumac and Teak, and basic test shows it working in the current master branch as well. We aim to keep it working with the next upcoming release if possible, but after that the repository will be put in read-only mode.