Please reintroduce --out

[ronkorving]

What was the reasoning behind removing --out apart from "not really useful"? For some of us, it clearly is (see #389 and #299), and that includes myself.

My projects are limited to one version of a component, and I use multiple build phases to create a multi-injection single page app. I like storing the 3rd party components for those builds in one common folder.

For my projects, that keeps 3rd party deps nicely in one place, which is a bit more manageable. The removal of --out made this pattern impossible. If there really is a compelling reason to not have --out, can you please explain it to me?

I think component has reached a level of popularity where the removal or change of an API or command line argument, no matter how small, can have a major impact on how people use it. I hope we can work towards stability and consensus where possible. Although I will readily admit that as far as consensus goes, I missed out on #299 and that was totally my bad.

[timoxley]

Perhaps just rename the components folder at the end of your build?

[jonathanong]

how are you splitting up builds?

you can use something like https://github.com/yields/component-bundle, though i foresee a billion different ways and edge cases with custom builds and i'm not sure how it handles those.

[ronkorving]

Right now, I add everything that got built in page 1 to the ignorelist of page 2, etc. The order in which I load pages is deterministic, so that works really well for me.

[stephenmathieson]

Can you do something like this (like @timoxley suggested)?

build: my-custom-out-dir index.js
    @component build --dev

my-custom-out-dir: component.json
    @component install --dev
    mv components my-custom-out-dir

[btknorr]

+1

We use --out for building components in the Titanium/Alloy mobile framework as a plugin. We can do it a different way, but would rather keep it the way it is.

[ronkorving]

@stephenmathieson Of course hacks are possible. But this used to work, and it wasn't hacky, was it?

[ghost]

Please put it back, thanks. This is the second thread on this topic with out reverting. Would appreciate some solid rationale for leaving it out or put it back so folks using it can use it without hacks, forks, or other work around.

[jonathanong]

imo it sounds like the real issue is that component doesn't have a good bundling framework, not that you actually care about --out.

i'm +1 to removing options from the CLI for simplicity. however, you should be able to specify your --out directory using the JS API as component becomes more lib-ish. component(1) should be accommodating small web components, and complicated apps should be using the JS API.

[ghost]

There is interest in having this option back. A collection of comments and two issues on this demonstrates interest and concern that does not seem to be heard. There is legitimate use case for building and locating the assets without additional software. Please take the feedback as constructive and revert this.

[ronkorving]

Until the new version of component and component builder are out and useable (to me, nothing using generators is usable until Node 0.12 is out and ideally has the generators harmony flag on by default), reintroducing --out will do the trick for me. I would love to use an API instead if I could.

Please keep in mind that solutions for tomorrow are great discussion material, but many of us need solutions yesterday.

[jonathanong]

i'm going to put this in, but i want it to be a hidden feature. i.e. it won't display in component install -h and stuff. trying to make the help commands and simple and short as possible.

[jonathanong]

anyone know how to make an option in commander.js without having it print in help?

[jonathanong]

this is going ot be annoying because you would basically have to do --out in every CLI command. let's discuss this in #517