if this was gonna go in, any way to pass in the exclusions on the command line?

I think via environment variables is the only way and that is pretty ugly. Even command line is pretty ugly with a bunch of excludes.

I think via environment variables is the only way and that is pretty ugly. Even command line is pretty ugly with a bunch of excludes.

I’m wondering whether it would be easy or desirable to do it with some sort of config file that is git-ignored. Then you could set it to whatever you like for local building and not need to revert each time you push.

Downside would be that I guess it would persist when you check out some other branch. I would likely forget about it and get confused about what’s going on with my doc build…

I would likely forget about it and get confused about what’s going on with my doc build…

could add a line to the conf printing excluded folders/files

I would likely forget about it and get confused about what’s going on with my doc build…

could add a line to the conf printing excluded folders/files

Possibly hard to spot amongst all the other output from the doc build?

Possibly hard to spot amongst all the other output from the doc build?

I'd put it at the very top b/f the sphinx generated output, where there really isn't much:

also possibly add a space/ "SPHINX OUTPUT BEGINS NOW" header between these two sections.

This commit adds a make html-skip-dirs option, and make html goes back to a full build. Still have to edit the conf.py.

It would be pretty easy to add a config file for this, but I hesitate just because I don't quite understand how that actually is git ignored. Either we distribute an example config file, or we don't. If we don't, then adding it to the gitignore is fine, but then users need to make it themselves by hand. Is that what we want?

@jklymak fair point.

It occurs to me that the contributor could also just not stage their conf.py changes. Though that for me would mean having to break the git commit -a habit!

I do commit -a all the time as well. But I'd do git restore conf.py to get it back to its original state.

But I guess having the user make a skip-dir.yml or something isn't very hard and could be in the comments of Makefile

eg.

skip_dirs: users/prev_whats_new/*
   - gallery/*
   - api/*
   - tutorials/*
   - plot_types/*
   - devel/*

should work.

OK, latest commit does this via a yaml. make html-skip-subdirs will make doc/.mpl_skip_subdirs.yaml with a default minimal build. The user can add or subtract entries to this (including commenting things out). Or if they remove it, it will get generated again when make html-skip-subdirs is called. This is .gitignore-d

Any chance you have a windows machine to update the make.bat? Otherwise thats a good first issue follow up. I think here it's gonna be basically the same command? )

I just pushed a change to make.bat. No idea if it works ;-)

Rebased so all tests should pass.

I know folks are busy with the release, but I'll agitate for this one a bit. a) it's a huge convenience for folks who are just changing a small part of the docs and b) it's also not user-facing, so the interface need not be set in stone. I've updated the proposal in the description above.

As a note, one can set something in conf.py from the command line via -D setting=value. However, I believe that doing so would mean that you could not check that value within the file itself, and you would need to move the processing of the value to another extension.

squashed...

I'll self merge this, because I want to use it ;-) and it's not at all user-facing.

It did have two approvals. Thanks @jklymak I am using this already 👍