Rewrite the build system in Node.js

[strugee]

Currently, AFAICT, the build system is written in an arcane combination of Ruby and Python. According to GitHub there's also some PHP in there, although this seems to not be a part of the build system.

I propose rewriting the build system in Node.js (and specifically, Gulp). This will provide more consistency in the repository.

WRT to the choice of Node + Gulp, these are just my personal preferences. Using Node has the advantage that we're writing in a web language (JS). Gulp is poised to become the most popular Node build system, displacing Grunt, but it's really just a personal preference of mine.

I'm very interested in working on this, but as this is obviously a large project I'm filing this issue to solicit feedback before I invest a lot of time in it. (If the community decides to go with something besides Gulp, though, I may not be able to do this myself.)

[benschwarz]

@strugee Thanks for raising this and taking a look around the repo.

I'd been thinking about making the effort to revitalise the bat-shit-crazy build system here and modernise a few of the transformations too — the original code was written as quickly as possible, and I had no idea where it was really heading.

Right now I'm not in the position to undertake this process, but if you're interested in taking it on, I'll do my best to help you and get it through.

My choice would be Gulp also, and ideally, I think we should host it using github pages (Using gulp-ghpages, perhaps).

ping @hixie

[Hixie]

I was planning on making the new HTML build system just generate the developers version but I've not hand the bandwidth unfortunately. The current output is: http://damowmow.com/temp/multipage-dev/

[Hixie]

If given very precise instructions, I can adjust the build system to build whatever you want. So feel free to reach out to me if you want me to work on this. I just don't have the bandwidth to do the design and development. I can write code.

[benschwarz]

@Hixie I was thinking overnight—perhaps it can be generated from the full single page spec… and we don't worry about exporting some special edition?

@strugee If you're looking for a holiday project, this could be it :smile:

[strugee]

If you're looking for a holiday project, this could be it :smile:

It's on my list! :P

[Hixie]

The single page spec doesn't include the annotations for what shouldn't be included in the developers version, they're stripped during publication. The source file does. You could generate it from the source file, or I could generate an intermediate version from the source file, or I could generate the final version from the source file. I'm happy to do either of the above. If I'm to generate something, I just need a precise description of what it is I'm to generate.

[benschwarz]

@hixie Lets use the actual source file and modify this code to take out what we don't want.

[benschwarz]

We'll modernise the suite after #107 drops, until then. This is on ice.