The title of the article is just a big click bait. Of course it's not worth it using Grunt/Gulp when you are running one task at a time.
Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
61–70 of 108 posts
Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
#62I think the use case of this author is very trivial. I don't see how I could use npm for a much more complicated build process with different targets (live, staging, local) or piping (coffee -> js -> min.js etc).
Not very familiar, but shouldn't those tools write to stdout?
Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hell for those of us outside of the Unix ecosystem. I have MSYS on my Windows machine and make works only half of the time. Also the learning curve is just not as easy, nor the files as readable. With Gulp and Grunt you are exploiting the fact that almost everyone can write a couple of lines of JavaScript. The only thing you are adding is an api composed of three to four functions. If you look at make on the oth…
Yes I'm on windows and already had the case of a npm package I would have liked to contribute but the build process was using make, couldn't make it work... It's a bit disapointing when you have a very good multiplatform ecosystem to see stuff like that, sometimes it's people "forgetting" there's also windows (and I can get that), but some other times it's just a big "fuck you windows user".
The general sentiment has been "fuck you linux user" for so long now, it's funny to see how things have changed in the last 15 years or so.
Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
And its different for Windows users who want to use Grunt, how exactly?
It's different in the way that it's trivial to use npm to install grunt and run builds on Windows, but not trivial to get a Makefile to run (if you don't want to resort to running cygwin bashs all the time).
my recollection from my windows times, is that cygwin is a pain to install and slow too, so there is no free lunch.
Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
#65This article seems super weird -- do people actually use Grunt/Gulp to run a single command at a time? Most uses that I've encountered are along the lines of 'we've got this huge build process involving compass, sass, uglify, ng-annotate, and 13 other things', and Grunt/Gulp allow you to do the whole thing, automatically re-running on file changes, with a single command.
You (and the rest of the comments to your post) miss the point: Now you need grunt, a gruntfile, the tools for the build process and grunt specific wrappers.
What you instead could have had was a simple script running the tools with the proper command line arguments.
Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
#66No. I refuse. I use CoffeeScript and SCSS and often install components via bower. I like grunt watch+serve+livereload to drive my development server environment. I like continuous testing with karma. Grunt helps me manage all of this centrally. npm simply does not have the functionality to be a legitimate replacement.
Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here, a bunch of complex & dependent tasks all boiled down to a few commands run often, and a bunch more less so. I also use grunt-shell a great deal rather than find/write a new plugin, pretty decent way to call out to bash.
Show me one task in your Gruntfile that is complex. grunt-shell also just wraps child_process.spawn which is already trivial.
If it's more than several lines, I write it out in a separate bash/js script and use grunt to call it, via shell or require() depending.
Not saying it's better than make or something else, but it's easy for everyone on the team to use & modify.
Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes I'm on windows and already had the case of a npm package I would have liked to contribute but the build process was using make, couldn't make it work... It's a bit disapointing when you have a very good multiplatform ecosystem to see stuff like that, sometimes it's people "forgetting" there's also windows (and I can get that), but some other times it's just a big "fuck you windows user".
The general sentiment has been "fuck you linux user" for so long now, it's funny to see how things have changed in the last 15 years or so.
I'm not sure what precisly you're referring to (proprietary software/drivers?), I love linux, used it almost exclusively for 5 years before my current .NET job.
I'm talking here about pure javascript npm packages, something you can legitimatly expect to be able to build on windows and yet some people make childish judgements on windows users and choose tools which exclude a part of the community (not always the case or the reason but it happens).
On a similar subject, I stopped counting the times I've seen someone get told to get a Mac when discussing a problem on cross platform tools.
Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
#69This article seems super weird -- do people actually use Grunt/Gulp to run a single command at a time? Most uses that I've encountered are along the lines of 'we've got this huge build process involving compass, sass, uglify, ng-annotate, and 13 other things', and Grunt/Gulp allow you to do the whole thing, automatically re-running on file changes, with a single command.
You (and the rest of the comments to your post) miss the point: Now you need grunt, a gruntfile, the tools for the build process and grunt specific wrappers. What you instead could have had was a simple script running the tools with the proper command line arguments.
Are you also against make, cmake, mvn, rake, etc...?
Those tools could also be replaced with custom scripts, but programmers in every language seem to agree that build tools make the job easier.
I don't think grunt or gulp are perfect, but do think they make writing, organizing, and reusing build tasks easier.
So are just against gulp/grunt, or really are opposed to the whole idea of a JavaScript build tool?
Re: Why we should stop using Grunt and Gulp
#70Why don't people just use make?
Is there a way to do a filewatch -> sass -> livereload with make? That was the primary reason for me using grunt.