Meetings

14 January 2014

Participants: Tyler, Jo, BenA, BenL, Eric

• Goal: have library authors (like Sass, CoffeeScript) maintain their own plugin that goes into any build tool (grunt, gulp, brunch, etc.)

• Task Specification

  • Streams vs Buffers vs Files

    • Streams
      • Implementations:
        • Gulp: https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp
      • Problems:
        • Templating engines are synchronous, streams are asynchronous
    • Buffers
      • Implementations:
        • DocPad
      • Problems:
        • DocPad runs out of memory for large sites (1GB+ of data)
    • Files
      • Implementations:
        • Grunt
      • Problems:
        • Interacting with the file system is slow
        • Templating engines are synchronous, file system is asynchronous

  • How will tasks be installed?

  • What use cases shall we handle?

    • Rendering transforms? E.g. http://docpad.org/docs/plugins#renderers
      • Are we just trying to be https://github.com/visionmedia/consolidate.js/
    • Async vs Sync?
      • https://github.com/bevry/taskgroup
      • https://github.com/bevry/event-emitter-grouped
    • Logging?
    • Server middlewares?
    • Misc: E.g. http://docpad.org/docs/plugins#helpers
    • Admin interfaces? E.g. http://docpad.org/docs/plugins#admin-interfaces

• Task Complications

  • Sourcemaps
    • Have to be implemented on every single step
  • RequireJS

• What do we need to agree on?

  • Do we want to do this? (implement the same task spec)
    • BenA: Grunt: Yes!
    • BenL: DocPad: We're happy though, but I'm doubtful of where in DocPad it would be implemented, as we are more than just rendering transforms

• BenL: Will DocPad interop with node task?

  • Does this make sense to implement?
    • Right now if someone wants to leverage interop, they just install the build system plugin they want, e.g. docpad-plugin-grunt
    • Advantage: less wrappers, interop on the application level

• Are we all trying to do the same thing? (implementing the same tasks in our own systems)

  • Grunt:
    • Uses file system
  • DocPad:
    • Uses asynchronous grouped event listeners: https://github.com/bevry/event-emitter-grouped
    • http://docpad.org/docs/events
    • http://docpad.org/docs/plugin-write
  • Gulp:
    • Uses standard streams with standard (error) events

• What are the biggest pain points of your current build system?

  • BenA: The grunt team do not have the bandwidth to manage all the issues with our 40+ plugins
  • Tyler: We have to trust people on code we don't know about, are implementing it the right way
    • A: Want to do it; Pro-active
    • B: Will do it; Capable