Automatically minify Javascript and CSS

[Peter Suter]

As discussed previously it might be a good idea to introduce a minification step that pre-processes the JavaScript and CSS files stored in source control.

This would allow developing with clean, well-commented source files while improving performance. We could then switch our JavaScript coding style to 4 spaces indentation and add copyright and documentation comments to file headers.

The step / a related step could do JSLint checking.

How should this be implemented?

• One suggestion was a make minify step.
• Another idea would be to add it to setup.py. ​minify or ​distwebres provide setuptools commands (both use YUI compressor, which requires Java)
• Alternatively, we could hook it into trac-admin deploy somehow.
• Or the web frontend could dynamically minify and cache and combine just the files required for a request into one file. (Including scripts by plugins.)

An important requirement might be to keep this step optional.