foundation-sites: Babel doesn't work on default foundation-zurb-template

[19:04:27] Failed to load external module babel-register
[19:04:27] Requiring external module babel-core/register

This is on Debian sid’s builds of node and npm, version 4.3.1 and 1.4.21 respectively.

About this issue

To address a few things that I don’t believe have been mentioned:

gulp-babel will read the configuration you have in .babelrc if it exists, even if you pass even a configuration object when calling $.babel() in your Gulpfile.
For Gulp to read a Gulpfile as ES6, it needs a .babelrc. Therefore, both your JavaScript build process and your Gulpfile have to be transpiled with the same Babel configuration.
Babel’s es2015 preset includes a CommonJS plugin, and one of the things it does is rename any top-level use of this to undefined.
what-input uses an AMD wrapper that uses a top-level this, which Babel was then breaking. The error in the console reads something like Cannot read property "root" of undefined.
You can configure the CommonJS plugin to not convert this to undefined by setting the allowTopLevelThis option to true.
However, if you load plugins through a preset, you can’t configure anything inside of the preset.
You could remove the CommonJS plugin, but then that breaks the Gulpfile because it uses import statements.

So this is a tangled web. Thankfully, we’re getting close to an out:

The creator of what-input published a version 2.0 which just strips the AMD wrapper entirely. That means it wouldn’t be affected by Babel’s CommonJS plugin.
That means we can go back to using the es2015 plugin with all the defaults set.
That means the .babelrc and package.json are much simpler: two Babel dependencies, one Babel preset.

We’ve already merged a PR to bump our what-input dependency to 2.0, so we can deploy that with a version 6.2.1.

Sorry for the hassle, friends, and thanks for your patience 😃