Cache generated documentation

[Altai-man]

Figure out a way to cache and update the documentation registry, and when to or not to regenerate individual pages.

This seems not so hard. We can just take a hash(even simple will be fine, faster is better) for every file, gather it in something like hashes.txt, then while building we check every page for a change of hash and re-generate/pass. We must, of course, update hashes.txt if some page was re-generated.

This issue is a part of TODO.

[Altai-man]

I thought about it for some time, so if my description above is good enough, I'm ready to assign myself for this issue.

[zoffixznet]

Is there a way to do it cleanly, though? For example, I see /todo.html page is generated during build and it's not a separate file in the source.

So, if we add the cache and I go and modify /testing POD. Will it now be smart enough to know to remove /todo.html?

[Altai-man]

I suppose - no.
If we have dynamic pages(and we have them, obviously), then we should keep something like dependency graph, which is not so simple.

But plain hash system(without dynamic pages) will cover many cases when you just want to change, for example, Operators.pod and re-generate only Operators.html, not all in the world types/exceptions/etc.

If someone willing to help with dependency graph, it's great, of course.

[AlexDaniel]

Sounds like a good start.

[Altai-man]

Basic implementation can be seen and tested here - #725

[JJ]

#725 was rejected. Is this going to to proceed in any way?

[Altai-man]

Not sure about this one. The main idea is that you do not want to re-generate all pages if you fixed a typo in a single one.
With dynamic site / documentation database, this ticket seems redundant to me(but we do not have one yet).

[JJ]

We do have #1823. This kind of thing would have to go through that.

[Altai-man]

Re-open if needed.

[JJ]

I'm reopening this since, as part of the #2392 , this is probably one of the most important things to do.

[JJ]

See also #2542

[Altai-man]

@JJ the Pod is already cached with help of Documentable++, I am somehow sure this can be closed now. Is there anything preventing closing?

[JJ]

Let me check and find a suitable thing to do so that it can be closed from a commit.