Consider retaining existing prerequisites for assets:precompile

[toastercup]

Greetings! I'm seeking clarification on logic (lib/tasks/assets.rake#L46) that's clearing the prerequisites of the assets:precompile task. Here's what the offending bits look like:

Rake::Task["assets:precompile"]
  .clear_prerequisites
  .enhance([:environment, "react_on_rails:assets:compile_environment"])
  .enhance do
    Rake::Task["react_on_rails:assets:symlink_non_digested_assets"].invoke
    Rake::Task["react_on_rails:assets:delete_broken_symlinks"].invoke
  end

I believe this works well for most setups, but in our case, we're using bower-rails, which adds bower:before_precompile as a prerequisite for this task. react_on_rails clears bower-rails's prerequisites as a result of this line.

First, I'd like to understand why react_on_rails chose to do this - perhaps it's necessary. If it's unnecessary, I'd like to submit a Pull Request to remove it so existing prerequisites can be executed unhindered. I dug around in the repo's history to see if I could glean a reason for its existence - it looks like the original incarnation did not clear_prerequisites. The only documentation about the introduction of this change is in this review, but I don't fully understand the reasoning nor can I find the documentation the comment mentions.

I'm sure I could force bower-rails to load last, so that it adds its prerequisites last, but I feel this is a cleaner solution, and would save others the extra step. Thoughts?

[justin808]

@toastercup in the past that line is necessary b/c we're overriding the default assets:precompile from Rails.

I'd suggest just doing the same for your task.

[toastercup]

@justin808 thanks for your time and for the quick response - after reviewing your comment and how this code works, this now makes sense to me. Have a splendid day!