"Abandon" grunt

[samreid]

Grunt is an older build system that puts a lot of constraints on our system, and that we aren't leveraging too much. While discussing #1272, @zepumph and I brainstormed a way we could abandon grunt without breaking backward compatibility:

• Keep grunt as an entry point
• Forward grunt commands to a new script via spawn or child process.

There is a sketch about how this could work in 1c7d111

We do not want this to be in-scope for #1272, but wanted to write it down for later.

• Commit mint or list a patch here. Done in Convert grunt entry points to support Typescript #1464
• Add mint --help that visits the tasks and gets the documentation.

[zepumph]

Yes thanks so much! It will be excellent to schedule this work once we have a better idea of how we are going to support typescript in our build tools.

[zepumph]

I believe the start to this issue is to reduce the amount that we are using the utilities in grunt. This will make future transitions easier.

There are currently:

• 60 usages of require( 'grunt' )
• 758 usages of grunt.
  • 152 usages of grunt.file (only 9 of grunt.file.recurse)
  • 181 usages of grunt.log
  • 225 usages of grunt.option

[zepumph]

Perhaps a separate issue to work on that is best.