Configuration Templates and Variables (nw.js, pixi.js versions)

[QuickBanjo]

An issue I noticed while doing the work behind #303 and #304: we don't always have a unified way of specifying certain values that are common throughout the whole project.

In my case, I found the NW.js version was specified in gulpfile.js, but I needed to use it in launch.json. I ended up just manually updating the latter to match the former, since neither of these files appear to have any way of pulling the desired value from, e.g. another file. I think the closest launch.json has is command input variables, which only solves the problem if we can write a script to do the job, and that's hard to do in a cross-platform manner.

Do any of our existing tools have a preprocessor or something that can handle this kind of nonsense at some stage in the development cycle? It'd be nice if, the same way we use the ${workspaceFolder} macro, we could just pull any variable we want from wherever.

[CosmoMyzrailGorynych]

devSetup.gulpfile.js is the closest thing that comes to mind. It is intended to be executed after every checkout.

[QuickBanjo]

The main issue I'd see with using gulp in this case is that we're actually updating gulpfile.js, and it's actually that file that we'd probably want to put it, so anyone who updates the version somewhere sees it everywhere else. But I guess we could work around that by making the gulpfile the canonical version, then having the script copy it to launch.json. The issue then becomes that we may not want the gulpfile to become an aggregation of these kind of configuration options.

Maybe it would be worthwhile doing it properly if we see more of this in the future, but it's probably not worth it just for the original use case I was asking about.

[CosmoMyzrailGorynych]

The issue then becomes that we may not want the gulpfile to become an aggregation of these kind of configuration options.

The nw.js version may be written in a separate JSON file, which can later be required by anything. And launch.json has to be updated by gulp or some kind of automation.