Question: Grunt Init & Yeoman

[wesleytodd]

I have a question regarding the relationship of Grunt and Yeoman. According to this wiki page:

In the coming months, Yeoman will completely replace grunt-init.

I am working on building a set of project boilerplates for personal/freelance use as well as for the company I work for. Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks to the opinionated nature of Yeoman that make it unlikely to fly at work (although it is great for my personal work). So I was hoping to use a simple(er) grunt init task. Reading the above made me doubt the decision.

So my question is, what is the roadmap for this project?

And thanks for the great work!

[jonschlinkert]

Yeah, I'm curious about this too. I'm not a big fan of shifting this to Yeoman. For starters since Yeoman doesn't work for Windows, but also because Yeoman's setup is more opinionated and difficult to extend IMO. I love the fact that the init templates are a built-in part of Grunt, I don't really look forward to having to find workarounds for Windows and trying to stay up-to-date on another lib. Grunt's awesome and I trust you guys will make a good decision, just my 2c.

[shama]

Take a look at this grunt issue: gruntjs/grunt#432

This proposal, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/yeoman-dev/cMk1rBP4OA4/discussion and this one, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/yeoman-dev/6zHPxHuW6V8.

[wesleytodd]

@shama Thanks, that is exactly what I was looking for!

For anyone else who stumbles on this in the future, the important parts are:

Yeoman plans to completely subsume grunt-init, not upstream generators to it. When that happens, grunt init goes away. Then you'll be able to use Yeoman for scaffolding and Grunt for your build process.

The generators will create everything statically up front, meaning their job will be to scaffold out the project with a Gruntfile (with generator specific tasks), package.json and every dependency you need based on some prompts. Then it's grunt's job to handle the task execution.

We will move towards Gruntfiles being more static and they will contain information about the build tasks/profiles you wish to use (which they should have from the start). This will make it possible to switch to use grunt directly with minimal changes.

[mingfang]

I was about to standardize my company's templates using grunt-init until I found this and similar issues.
Is grunt-init really going to die?
I really hope not because I think it's the perfect tool for me.
I tried yeoman and don't like it.

[shama]

@mingfang You're welcome to continue using grunt-init if you prefer it. There isn't any plans, AFAIK, to "kill" it. It just isn't in as active development in favor of yeoman.