Prune Grunt tasks

[samreid]

Discovered in #1459, there are many tasks in chipper's Gruntfile.js or perennial's Gruntfile.js that:

• appear unused
• are unrelated to the other grunt responsibilities

@zepumph and I recommend reviewing each grunt task to see if it can be deleted or moved to a separately executable script. Things that should remain are: simulation lifecycle events like grunt --brands=phet grunt dev grunt rc grunt lint and their dependencies. And for tasks that must remain stable, well-supported, and backward-compatible for maintenance tasks.

This work will help us modularize & limit our usage of grunt, which we would like to "abandon" #1436

It will also free us up to use other runtimes (such as deno or tsx) or TypeScript as desired.

I will tag suspicious grunt tasks, then bring to Monday's developer meeting. I will make annotations in perennial/main and chipper's typescript_chipper_1459_b branch. (and they can (mostly?) be seen below)

[zepumph]

Much of this issue should probably wait until we finish discussing phetsims/perennial#370.

[zepumph]

Good work for this issue is being done over in phetsims/perennial#370.

Take this issue off hold once that issue is closed.

[zepumph]

Ready to focus on the TODOs for this issue.

[zepumph]

Most of these are now just the "ASK DEVS" TODOs.

[zepumph]

I made a form to ask devs about the items we have marked with TODOs. I'll send it out now.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1IXJCC33lyDIfDly0rFVsPAIWADkpKztM0NWH4umgfXg/edit

https://forms.gle/M2yfQrauAPeXcRrw5

[zepumph]

Alright. With 8 responses, here are the results:

KEEP:
perennial/bin/print-missing-repos.sh
perennial/bin/checkout-branch.sh -> check in with @jbphet
grunt clone-missing-repos

DELETE:
perennial/bin/print-shas.sh -> let @pixelzoom know so he can use it privately
perennial/bin/grunt-all.sh
perennial/bin/lodash-find.sh
perennial/bin/print-all-licenses.sh
grunt cherry-pick
grunt maintenance-check-branch-status
grunt maintenance-create-patch
grunt maintenance-list
grunt npm-update
grunt sha-check

[zepumph]

print-shas.sh

#!/bin/bash
#=======================================================================================
#
# Prints shas for all repos in the working directory.
#
# Author: Chris Malley (PixelZoom, Inc.)
#
#=======================================================================================

binDir="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"
workingDir=${binDir}/../..
cd ${workingDir}

for repo in `ls -1`
do
  # Strip newline from end of repo
  repo=`echo ${repo}`

  # if it's a Git repository...
  if [ -d ${repo}/.git ]; then
    cd ${repo} > /dev/null

    # format is "{{repo}} {{sha}}"
    echo "${repo} `git rev-parse HEAD`"
    cd .. > /dev/null
  fi
done

[zepumph]

Alright I think we are pretty close here. From the survey, a couple things to check in on:

1. @pixelzoom asked to be mentioned if we delete print-shas. We deleted it because he was the only one that used it but said he was Okay to delete it. I posted the script in the above comment.
2. @jbphet mentioned that he uses checkout-branch. I'm happy to keep it around, but wanted to note that we have grunt checkout-main-all, and an option for it called grunt checkout-main-all --branch={{BRANCH_NAME}}. The grunt task runs in parallel and is likely 5x or more faster. If that seems like your use case and you'd like to use that instead, let me know. Otherwise, we should keep it around.

@jbphet please feel free to close this issue if you just want to keep checkout-branch.sh.

[jbphet]

@zepumph - I'm all for keeping things tidy, so please go ahead and delete checkout-branch.sh. I'll make a note and will use the grunt tasks you mention above when the need next arises.

[zepumph]

Excellent, and thank you for your flexibility. Last TODO removed above. Closing