Remove .pipe method

[phated]

This method seems like really old cruft that doesn't belong.

A few reasons I think it should be removed:

• Vinyl isn't actually a stream, so having a pipe method could confuse duck-typing
• The pattern for dealing with streams in plugins is:

if (file.isStream()) {
  file.contents = file.contents.pipe(transform());
}

@contra do you agree?

[yocontra]

@phated yep

[twolfson]

Are there plans to replace .pipe() with another method? I know it's a small increase of 1 line to 3 lines but it winds up bloating all downstream plugins =/ (e.g. now I'm responsible for testing buffers/streams are handled consistently)

[binarykitchen]

With the removal of this bad pipe function many gulp plugins do not work anymore. Trying to fix one with this old code:

      file // instance of Vinyl
        .pipe(split2())
        .pipe(through(someFunction(),  function(callback) {
          if (content.length) {
            file.contents = new Buffer(content.join('\n'));
            that.push(file);
          }
          // callback();
          cb();
        }));

file comes from var stream = through2.obj(function(file, enc, cb) {

How to fix this best?

[yocontra]

@binarykitchen This ticket was for the removal of a really old function file.pipe that was never really used or adopted. file.contents = file.contents.pipe(whatever) is the replacement for this case. There are a bunch of issues with your example code, but that's more something you should get help with on StackOverflow or similar.

[binarykitchen]

Right, thanks