[xdissent]

Regarding plugin dependencies, gulp maintains a blacklist of plugins that are not recommended for various reasons (bloat, poor design, unnecessary, etc): https://github.com/gulpjs/plugins/blob/master/src/blackList.... They also link to an article about why you should resist the urge to create gulp plugins on their wiki: http://blog.overzealous.com/post/74121048393/why-you-shouldn... Additionally, they maintain a collection of examples of common use cases that tend to send people searching for plugins unnecessarily: https://github.com/gulpjs/gulp/tree/master/docs/recipes Other popular projects also recommend against plugins for integration into gulp, such as browserify and karma test runner. There are a number of great support packages for gulp that handle the handful of special file stream manipulations that you may need to perform (vinyl-buffer, vinyl-source-stream) and since gulp operates on node streams (object mode) many useful npm packages already apply.