How to contribute to v5?

[luxurioussauce]

Is v5 still being worked on? And if I want to contribute, where should I push my fixes?

[ricmoo]

The v5 branch is no longer meant to be used in new projects as it is nearly 3 years old.

The plan is to get a security release out to address two audit warnings in its dependencies; of which the more serious does not affect Ethers (since Ethers sanitizes the inputs to the Elliptic library) and the other is only of concern when interacting with a malicious WebSocket host. But it would still be nice to get rid of audit warnings, I agree.

The issue with new v5 releases, is that the Karma libraries it uses for testing in the browser are deprecated, and this testing is paramount, since there are legacy applications that rely on it. Any break in the library is bad. I take semver quite seriously. :)

I guess my main questions would be what fixes you need in v5, and if you can migrate to v6? The v6 code uses modern JS features (like BigInt) which are easier to use and less error prone, is designed from the ground-up to be tree-shakable for smaller code and is actively maintained.

If you want to make changes via PR available to others though, I have been working off of the v5 branch, trying to get the browser tests happy again.

I have also been considering breaking out the Browser testing of v6 into a new library, which could then be used in v5, but in general, there is a lot missing from v5 as the ecosystem has continued evolving since the split from v6, such as new transaction types, new errors, etc.