Should we use repos or internal modules for different languages? about assemble-front-matter

[jonschlinkert]

my opinion with assemble in particular is that the focus should be usability for UI folks. So when developers give us a hard time for not modularizing properly or whatever, explain that our main goal is ease-of-use until we get substantial adoption. IMO at that point we'll focus on efficiency.

With any other libs related to assemble I like the idea of modularizing and splitting into separate repos as much as possible. we should keep the language definitions in separate modules like what you're saying. For now though, until a spec for them is pretty solid, I would keep the languages together. It would be a pain to have to update a bunch of language repos if you changed something small. Here is a stab at it - this is missing a couple of things but it seems like a good start.

exports.language: {
  markdown: {
    ext: ['.md']
    ...
  },
  handlebars: {
    ext: ['.handlebars', '.hbs'],
    highlightSyntax: 'html',
    commentsBlock: [
      {
        open: '<!--',
        body: '',
        close: '-->'
      },
      {
        open: '{{!',
        body: '',
        close: '}}'
      },
      {
        open: '{{!--',
        body: '',
        close: '--}}'
      }
    ],
    regex: []
  },
  ...

I have definitions like this for about 30 languages. If you like this idea I can add regex for a bunch of them and push it up later. Then we can add methods to this lib for using the definitions, like methods for doing find/replace on comment blocks or just stripping them, etc. I think these things seem common enough that utilities methods for them would be useful.

Then we can depend on this lib with the yaml and front-matter modules.

[jonschlinkert]

btw, if it's okay with you let's rename this to frontmatter since it's more generic and more likely to be used in other modules. it's available with npm too.

[jonschlinkert]

one more thought since I missed this comment

it occurred to me that the assemble-'lang' repos would just be wrappers around other libraries

let's try to define the modules and see what this looks like. we have:

• frontmatter: methods for extracting, converting or even inserting front matter. the focus of this lib is making frontmatter easier to use.
• language definitions: used by frontmatter, but also applicable to any other projects that need things like common file extensions associated with a language, regex patterns for code comments, etc. the focus of this lib is to provide rock-solid language definitions and regex for common use cases.
• parsing: all 3rd party libs

[doowb]

So basically we'll have the following hierarchy for this repo:

• frontmatter: main repo used for extracting, converting, and/or inserting front matter.
  • assemble-lang: contains a structure of common languages, extensions, regex, and ways for figuring out which language to use (can be used in repos other than frontmatter)
  • 3rd party libs: This includes js-yaml and other parsing libs used inside frontmatter after figuring out the language to use.

By doing this, assemble-yaml will go away and we'll just have the frontmatter repo. Is there a better name than assemble-lang for the languages?

[jonschlinkert]

sounds good. assemble-lang is fine, we can change it after I have a chance to lookup keywords and see what people are looking for

[jonschlinkert]

By doing this, assemble-yaml will go away and we'll just have the frontmatter repo

you could just rename assemble-yaml to assemble-lang or just lang or lang-utils or whatever. or just start from scratch, whatever you prefer

[doowb]

This has been resolved with gray-matter