metanorma site dependencies

[opoudjis]

It would be nice if metanorma site was a little more like Make, in (a) having a "clean" option, and (b) not building files that had already been built --- so that execution can resume after a site generation has been aborted, rather than restarting from the beginning.

[ronaldtse]

This falls into Rake functionality, which metanorma-cli can directly require. Basically we can create Rake File rules using the defined paths in metanorma.yml.

And yes, we did talk about this before.

[ronaldtse]

The challenge is that stale documents can't be known. We can check the built file against "last modified time" of the source .adoc file, but if it uses includes, we can't detect the changes within those included files.

[ronaldtse]

We can parse the document in Metanorma and retrieve the build dependency tree (which nodes contain all dependent file paths) to a particular end product (the XML file). If there are updates to the file paths (a file path has mtime later than the XML), then we re-generate the XML.

In fact, we can re-do the Metanorma site compilation flow (and collection build) to rely on Rake for dependency checking.