False Positives with gulp-load-plugins && gulp-jshint

Hello,

Was looking around at how to determine un-used npm packages and found your project.

When I ran it the following report was generated. However, due to the way I’m loading gulp plugins (using gulp-load-plugins, my guess is this tool is not picking up anything that is dynamically loaded. Similarly, I’m asking it to use the jshint-stylish reporter for my jshint, which I presume is another dynamically loaded thing…

Unused Dependencies
* gulp-debug

Unused devDependencies
* gulp-markdown
* gulp-mocha
* gulp-plumber
* gulp-jshint
* gulp-jscs
* jshint-stylish
* gulp-istanbul

I can’t say I have any bright ideas on how you can solve these problems, but in case you hadn’t heard of them, they might be interesting ones to look into.

[lijunle]

@eckdanny I understand that, it is very hard to detect all dynamic dependencies. However, our principle is to try to enable one more, and one more detector.

For this particular issue (gulp-load-plugins), there are three levels of supports:

• When seeing gulp-load-plugins package, all gulp-* dependencies are considered in use. 👉 https://github.com/depcheck/depcheck/pull/127
• Recognize the dynamic reference (the packages are lazy loaded). 👉 https://github.com/depcheck/depcheck/pull/127
• Recognize the gulp-load options, the gulp pattern from options is used.

From my estimate, the first feature will cover 80% user cases - although it will miss some unused dependencies. Besides the second feature, it will cover ~90% cases.

The first one should be easy, the second is hard - I will make a try. We won’t consider the third feature until someone comes back and request a third feature.

[nfantone]

Nice!