Async localTask and remoteTask

[devonoel]

I really lazily implemented two of .exec's private function, localTask and remoteTask, which take care of running commands locally and against some server respectively.

They're implemented synchronously, meaning that Gunter will wait around for a task to finish before .exec eventually returns either false if it errors or the task object that was executed if successful.

Instead, they should be implemented asynchronously, since this is the whole reason I implemented this as a Node.js package instead of some Sinatra API or something. They should execute tasks in the background, and call some callback function when complete, of the form callback(error, task), where callback(error) is called if there's an error, and callback(null, task) is called if the task is executed with no errors.

[devonoel]

This is solved in branch async-exec, though the branch is still in development, and brings up another issue: how to actually handle the completion of a task execution (and for that matter, how to capture and communicate stdout from the task executing).

• An EventEmitter is my first instinct, though it'll require an expansion of the API and increase complexity on the client side
• Could also enforce passing exec a callback, but this will (as far as I can conceive) only allow the client to process the final result, and not stdout along the way
• I should also look into streams, because I don't really understand them yet

[devonoel]

Gonna go with an EventEmitter here. It can handle both task completion, and individual command completion elegantly. Gunter will export an emitter object that client's can use to listen for events emitted by exec to communicate its state.