Re: [ww-users] cleaning out old directories

[Lee W. <wor...@gm...>]

On 04/04/11 20:56, Jonathan Dushoff wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Lee Worden<wor...@gm...>  wrote:
>> Hi Peter!
>
>> So the recommended treatment for big costly files is to isolate their
>> make rules to be run only in background jobs:
>> http://lalashan.mcmaster.ca/theobio/projects/index.php/Background_Jobs#Background_jobs_design_pattern
>
>> If you do that, they won't be remade unless you do it explicitly by
>> creating a background job.
>
> Another recommended move is to save them on the wiki as archived project files.
>
>> Or you can just make sure to use<project-file ... make=false/>  and
>> write your make rules so that nothing that makes automatically has a
>> dependency on any of your costly targets.
>
> This is tricky, because you typically want to make things from your
> costly targets, and you would like your make rules to reflect that
> accurately.

True.

>> If we did have a "do not remake" flag I'd hesitate to assume that
>> anything not tagged could be erased, because it's common to put off
>> housekeeping tasks like making sure all the files are tagged when you
>> add new ones.
>
>> A way to change things to source files might be useful - or something
>> like Jonathan has suggested (if I remember right), where project files
>> that are being archived in the wiki get written back out to the working
>> directory, so they're preserved even if the whole directory gets
>> removed.  But those kind of ideas are confusing and troubling to me and
>> I don't know what to do with them.
>
> Here's something I've always wanted to try.  You could have a valuable
> target be an archived project file living in the Media: space.  Then
> another project could use that same Media: page as a source file.
> Seems like it should work well.  I was thinking it should be done
> across projects, but it seems like it would work to allow you to
> control the flow within a project as well.
>
> JD

Oh, man.  You could do that.  I should make sure that when it archives 
to that page it flags it properly, because any time a source file is 
changed, pages need to be expired from the parser cache so things will 
be remade.  I think it would work actually.  (Though it wouldn't matter 
if it's in the same project, because it's coming from the working 
directory and syncing it back to the directory would be a null operation 
and wouldn't necessitate any further makes, so actually it doesn't need 
to be flagged in that case.  But it does if it's a source file in a 
different project.)  If you do try it I'd like to watch! :)