Separate the core and the generator instances

[SBoudrias]

At the moment, every Yeoman helper function is directly linked to the generator instance (this.write, this.log, this.spawn, etc).

This is good for a lot of them as they need to be executed in context, but for a lot of other methods, that's not really the case.

I wonder if it wouldn't be cleaner to separate the generator instances from the utility functions. And instead of calling this.spawn, being able to call yo.spawn.

I haven't check exactly which methods are context independent, so maybe there's not enough to make it worthwhile.

[SBoudrias]

Checked a bit while coding today, and there's already three modules being inserted out of the generator context here: https://github.com/yeoman/generator/blob/master/lib/base.js#L92-L94 - so they're #1 candidates.

And then I realized that really only the actions.js module is hardly linked to the generator instance (because it uses paths variables to prefix his action). Most of the others helpers modules really are mostly standalone helpers.

I believe this would be cleaner than using instances methods (plus it liberate devs from the hassle of this binding for free).

[addyosmani]

I'm 👍 to us opting for moving towards instance methods.

[sindresorhus]

👍

[MarcoScabbiolo]

plus it liberate devs from the hassle of this binding for free

That sounds like a good enough reason for me!

On top of decoupling the utility methods from the Generator instance it would be nice to auto-bind the methods that need to run in the context of the Generator so we can pass them around without having to bind them every time.

Decoupling may take some effort but just binding the methods shouldn't take so much, I could do it if everybody is OK with the idea.

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