Chore/DX: move from make to JS-based taskrunner

Given the higher barrier for contribution for Windows users introduced by us using make, we should explore moving to a JS-based taskrunner. WSL should be the silver bullet for this, but I haven’t been able to get lerna bootstrap run in WSL (and it looks like I’m not the only one).

My initial exploration is here, but some tests are failing and I think it’s due to the fact that shelljs doesn’t preserve colors in the output of running shell commands.

Some other alternatives:

• Modify the current shelljs PR and switch out shelljs.exec() for something like node-cross-spawn or execa.
• Go all in on Gulp
• Use something like Just

Would love to hear others’ opinions on this! 😃

Follow-up question:

We use a lot of shell scripts in the dev build process that don’t work natively in Windows. Should we also rewrite these in JS?

[thorn0]

@kaicataldo found it here https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/806

[TomasHubelbauer]

We use a lot of shell scripts in the dev build process that don’t work natively in Windows. Should we also rewrite these in JS?

Yes, please! I’m not partial about them being in JS, but they should IMO be cross-platform, so there are other options like PowerShell or something. But JS feels like the best choice given the project itself is written in it.