[tinco]

I'm a bit confused, what are they using grunt for? We're using gulp, but it's basically the same software. It just compiles our coffeescript, tags some assets and moves some files around, perhaps run a minifier somewhere.

In what situation do you need your build toolchain to do more than that?

[geetee]

I think I found myself in a similar situation as the OP. We have multiple different, but architecturally similar, products which each get their own Gruntfile. If we stop here, we're solid, perfect. Unfortunately, each product has multiple flavors which each need to build into their own separate output directories. For us, that's where the Grunt patterns break down and get awkward. It's actually been good enough for almost 2 years now, but I can definitely see the cracks.

[NTH]

Yes, that sounds very much like the scenario we see ourselves in. For us, we have too many projects for copy/pasting the Gruntfile between them to be a viable option, and the Gruntfiles themselves would have been too complex.

I'm not convinced the shell scripts are a good alternative, though. (Maybe they are for your scenario.) I would like to write a follow-up post talking about this.

[mikegioia]

Why don't you just write shell scripts?

[geetee]

I will probably go that route if we ever rebuild those tools.