Metalsmith 3.0 Roadmap

[webketje]

This issue is meant to group & provide an overview of what features will be in release 3.0

• Use Node streams to read & write files + benchmark
• Allow destructuring Metalsmith methods, e.g. const { use, clean, build } = new Metalsmith()
• Make inner variables (_source, _metadata, _directory etc) truly inaccessible using symbols or a factory closure (TBD)
• Remove the unyield dependency & rewrite all methods using them to return promises (done in 2.5), TBD if callback support should be fully removed
• Remove the co-fs-extra dependency & rewrite all methods using it to use native NodeJS API's (done in 2.5)
• Reading files into memory buffers that are intended only for copying over to a destination directory (static assets) can incur significant overhead. Introduce a method (Metalsmith#static/copy('favicon.ico', 'assets/**')?) that uses the NodeJS copyFile method that is more efficient than readFile then writeFile.
• There's a lot of discussion about getting the "final" filepath of a metalsmith file for rendering with layouts (see Metalsmith and Filenames, What can we do to improve them? #58). To be evaluated whether this could be solved by making the file objects actual instances of a File or FileObject constructor that knows a reference to its parent object and has a getter/setter that finds a reference to itself like Object.keys(files).find(key => files[key] === this). Bonus is better type-hinting. Issues are: what if the file object is cloned to a different path? how to handle dynamically injected prototype-less files by plugins?