# v8 release update

## Version 8 release update

**TL;DR: New target release date is February 22, or end of February at latest. Also, your version 7-style Button imports will now work without modification.**

First of all, apologies for the delayed release and lack of updates. In addition to holiday-related delays, there have been some shifts around our approach to converging components with `@fluentui/react-northstar` that had an indirect impact on version 8. While these changes caused delays, we're confident that we're now on a better path overall for both our converged and existing components.

The overall short-term impact is actually that **`@fluentui/react` version 8 is now more similar to version 7.**

### Button changes

For most consumers, the most impactful changes are around Button:
- We've **returned to exporting the old Button by default**, after convergence discussions showed that the new Button (`@fluentui/react-button`) is not production-ready quite yet
- As such, **compat exports will be removed** for now. `@fluentui/react/lib/compat` and `@fluentui/react/lib/compat/Button` will be removed in a near-future beta release.

### Preview package and ThemeProvider changes

The main change directly resulting from convergence work is that `@fluentui/react-button`, `@fluentui/react-theme-provider` and `@fluentui/react-compose` have been **moved back to "dev" status (not preview)** while we make some refinements. This will have no impact on existing consumers who hadn't started experimenting with those new packages.

If you are currently directly consuming `@fluentui/react-theme-provider` and using it with `@fluentui/react` version 8, you should switch to import `ThemeProvider` related from `@fluentui/react` or `@fluentui/react/lib/Theme` instead. `@fluentui/react-theme-provider` will remain beta version and be actively updated with breaking changes after version 8 official release (similar to `@fluentui/react-button`).

### Package structure changes

In the original beta version, most of the files from `@fluentui/react` were moved into `@fluentui/react-internal` and other packages. **This has now been reverted.**

For those who haven't started testing the beta yet, this will have no impact (and might make things easier when you do upgrade). The only negative impact should be for consumers who are using deep imports and had already started updating their deep imports as part of testing the beta.

- Most component files that were located within `office-ui-fabric-react` in version 7 have moved back to `@fluentui/react`.
- Version 8 Checkbox, Link, Pivot, Slider, and Toggle have moved back to `@fluentui/react` from individual `@fluentui/react-*` packages
- As a result, we were able to get rid of `@fluentui/react-internal` (most of the circular dependencies that required it have been removed)
- The component files from `@fluentui/react-date-time` (formerly `@uifabric/date-time`) have moved into `@fluentui/react` itself, and are re-exported from `@fluentui/react-date-time`.
- Unless you're using deep imports, this should have no impact.
- The move was needed to resolve a circular dependency, now that the newer (`@fluentui/react-date-time`) Calendar and DatePicker are exported from `@fluentui/react` by default.