[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #44492: Add new --dev to allow building and cleaning /src again. (was: Add new build:dev task which symlinks all files that can be symlinked)

[WordPress Trac]

#44492: Add new --dev to allow building and cleaning /src again.
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 Reporter:  omarreiss         |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement       |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal            |   Milestone:  5.1
Component:  Build/Test Tools  |     Version:
 Severity:  normal            |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  needs-testing     |     Focuses:
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Description changed by omarreiss:

Old description:

> This ticket introduces a new build task, meant specifically for
> development: `grunt build:dev`.
>
> The main difference with a regular build is that files are symlinked when
> possible instead of copied. This saves a lot of build time and means you
> don't have to rebuild anymore for most PHP changes. Since PHP files in
> `build/` are now symlinked to `src/`, changes are picked up directly.
>
> The new `grunt build:dev` task first checks if it can create a symlink on
> the system it runs on. If this is not the case, it will fallback to
> copying. `grunt watch` will also trigger `build:dev` instead of `build`
> now since it is only used in dev environments anyway.
>
> Files that are exempted from symlinking are the JS and CSS files, the
> themes, embed.php, formatting.php and version.php. This is because these
> are all transformed in some way when built. When someone adds a new file,
> they would still have to build to have it included.
>
> This ticket was inspired by issues that were raised after #43055 got
> committed, mostly in the #core-committers channel on Slack. The main
> issues I've seen are the following:
> - Some people have lots of plugins in their `wp-content` folder. Building
> means copying all the plugin files over to `/build`. For some this
> crashes.
> - Developing with `grunt watch` can give issues on some development
> environments that run in VirtualBox (like VVV), where changes aren't
> being picked up. Having to rebuild manually after each change is a
> hassle.
> - XDebug breakpoints set in `src/` wouldn't be picked up.
>
> I believe these issues should mostly be mitigated or resolved through
> this ticket. I wasn't able to test so myself so I could use some help
> reviewing and confirming this is indeed a big improvement.

New description:

 This ticket introduces a `--dev` flag to the `build`, `copy`, `watch` and
 `clean` tasks, meant specifically for development. This makes it possible
 to develop from `/src` again.

 When running `grunt build --dev` we only run `grunt build:js` and `grunt
 build:css`. When running a regular `grunt build` we also include `grunt
 build:files`, which also copies over the PHP. This means we've also
 separated the different build concerns into different build tasks that
 could be run separately (extra win! 🎉).

 We first tried an approach which used symlinking. However, this gave too
 many issues on too many systems so we reverted back to an approach which
 allows building into `/src`

 This ticket was inspired by issues that were raised after #43055 got
 committed, mostly in the #core-committers channel on Slack. The main
 issues I've seen are the following:
 - Some people have lots of plugins in their `wp-content` folder. Building
 means copying all the plugin files over to `/build`. For some this
 crashes.
 - Developing with `grunt watch` can give issues on some development
 environments that run in VirtualBox (like VVV), where changes aren't being
 picked up. Having to rebuild manually after each change is a hassle.
 - XDebug breakpoints set in `src/` wouldn't be picked up.

 I believe these issues should mostly be mitigated or resolved through this
 ticket. More testing needed.

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Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/44492#comment:19>
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