Remove Gulp as a dependency

I’m proposing we remove Gulp as a dependency, based on the following thought process:

Gulp should only be used for running highly specific tasks (e.g, I wanna find files that match this pattern and create new files or apply very creative transformations on them that entail multiple steps). Gulp is overkill for general asset pipelines.

In this scenario, the raw processors can likely do the job just as well (if not better), plus using them directly will:

• Eliminate abstractions (like gulp-postcss)
• Allow us to more quickly update dependencies (like webpack@4.0)
• Not use gulp’s crappy watch functionality

---

I’ll create a branch called remove-gulp, wherein I will remove gulp, leaving:

• webpack@4.0 & webpack-cli: this means faster, leaner, smaller builds
• postcss & postcss-cli: this means faster CSS builds, and the ability to completely abstract away PostCSS configuration
• imagemin & imagemin-cli: we don’t need no gulp.
• svgo: we don’t need no gulp.

---

Is there any defaults to webpack, postcss, or imagemin that they’d like to share. Calling all static site power rangers. @budparr @ncphillips @scottgallant @jamespohalloran

[chrisdmacrae]

@budparr My thought is to expose the PostCSS config both ways, in Webpack and as its own pipeline, so that you can use either workflow.

My reasoning is that a lot of static site devs aren’t JS gurus, and are more used to gulp/sass approach. Being forced to require your CSS, and having no control over the output files can be very frustrating.

When Webpack@4.x releases the first party support for CSS as a valid entry point, I’ll probably remove PostCSS CLI.

[ncphillips]

Thanks @chrisdmacrae really looking forward to seeing how this turns out. @zivbk1 may be interested in contributing as well. I will be busy over the next few days, but I will keep an eye on the discussion and code pushes.