OK, this is the first time I've tried using gulp so I'm probably missing something fundamental. But I've played with this for hours now, tried to execute examples verbatim, etc. Here's a very basic script that never executes the 'print' task with the debugger statement.
var gulp = require('gulp');
gulp.task('print', function(cb) {
debugger;
console.log('print something dammit');
cb();
});
gulp.task('default', ['print']);
In case it matters, I'm running node v0.11.13 on Ubuntu Linux 14.04.
gulp must be installed as npm --global install gulp. It will not work correctly if not globally installed. Then gulp must be invoked via the command gulp at the command line. It will not work correctly if invoked via node gulp which is the way I was invoking it. In that sense it's not quite like any other node program.