Questions and observations from a brunch user

[ahacking]

I thought I would take a closer look at Iridium (I am using brunch currently) and had a few observations and questions:

• The build tooling appears tied to specific version of handlebars and requires forking the gem to change it. I don't think it is a good idea for a build tool such as Iridium to force a version of a component on the users client code.
• There doesn't appear to be the ability to specify different vendor sources for different environments. eg fully commented version for development vs a pre-minified version for production which may also have other differences than just minification.
• I didn't see any mention of live-reload, does Iridium support file watching, development rebuild and automatic browser reload?
• Does Iridium generate source-maps ? ( I like to have a single app.js which changes often and vendor.js (which is typically large and changes less often) when developing, along with source-maps. This provides for fast refresh in development vs attempting to fetch hundreds of individual files.
• I didn't see any specifics on managing vendor sources. For example, with brunch I can use bower (for better or worse) to manage vendor source versions and dependencies and fetch the required vendor sources. When I update my bower.json, brunch will detect the file change, run bower to fetch new sources and dependencies, rebuild my javascripts and css and automatically live-reload the result in my browser. Can Iridium do anything like that? If so can you describe the suggested approach to managing and fetching vendor sources with Iridium?
• I considered https://rails-assets.org/ as a gem bower bridge but its tied to a sprockets pipeline and that's not something I want to use again.

I'd like to use Iridium in anger and whilst I am mostly happy with brunch I dislike having to pull in the node kitchen sink that brunch requires just for my client build pipeline.