aiwilliams/octopress — Issue #7: `octopress watch`: Incremental as possible site generation
Author: aiwilliams
Created: 2012-02-10 16:41:56+00:00
State: open

Just talked at length with @imathis. Here are the features we'd love to see in ```octopress watch```:

* Extensible. We use sass for stylesheets in theme-classic, but perhaps other folks would like something else, and we'd love to use Slim for html.
* Incremental. We don't want to re-process every file when one things changes. Jekyll is notorious for it's part in this, but it shouldn't burden an extensions. For instance, if a sass file changes, we don't need to re-render posts.
* Helpful. Failures should not be buried, nor should they halt execution.
* Jekyll::Site#process should run only if it has to, since it re-renders all posts.

Thoughts:

* Fork Jekyll for octopress, making it so that changing one post does not re-render all posts.
* Guard might be a good solution, but it should meet the goals above.
* Jekyll generators run every time, even when only one file changes. Considering the goals above, they probably cannot be used unless our fork allows for an approach more like guard, where we define which files invoke which generator, and does that generator produce resources that would trigger a re-generation of any posts/pages/layouts.
* If a layout changes, any post or page that references it must be regenerated??