downgrade vinyl dependency to ^0.4.0

[evocateur]

As I mentioned in a comment on 64325ae, the current version of gulp depends on a different version of vinyl-fs (and thus vinyl) than the version gulp-util 3.0.6 depends on. A given version of gulp and gulp-util should share the same underlying version of vinyl-fs/vinyl, surely?

[yocontra]

@evocateur the vinyl update was just some new APIs so no breaking changes. vinyl-fs (on master, not pushed yet) is already updated and so is gulp on the 4.0 branch. theres no problem with having gulp-util be on a new version

[yocontra]

Just read your comment, yeah it does cause a breaking change if people are using instanceof. Unfortunately, reverting the change is also a breaking change and some people are already relying on the update. I'm on the side of not breaking it again. Really, updating any module that exports a class is going to be problematic so I don't think there is anything that we as module authors can do to prevent this other than tell people not to use instanceof.

Going forward we should probably discourage instanceof checks and add a vinyl .isInstanceOf function.

[evocateur]

I just wasted a whole damned day trying to understand why my gulp plugin stream (that clones and manipulates vinyl File instances) wasn't behaving the same way in my tests as it was while being used in an external gulpfile.

instanceOf is not the issue, quite frankly. It was only used in my tests, not the plugin itself, and was overly paranoid. Instead of instanceOf, I could poke around and assert that all the properties of a File instance exist, but I'd rather not pollute my unit tests with that sort of brittle quacking.

gulp-util v3.0.6 is still backward-incompatible with gulp v3.9.0 in the current scheme because a plugin author who uses the File export of gulp-util (as almost every single available tutorial and example does) will expect the new API, attempt to modify something like basename on the File instances being passed into their plugin stream, and now it's broken when used in every currently-available installation of gulp.

[yocontra]

@evocateur Don't use gulp-util, it is being deprecated. Also, I've add an isVinyl function to the vinyl module so no need for instanceof or duck-typing

[evocateur]

Thanks for putting up with my crankiness. Looking forward to the future!