convert add_depends to use influences

[git.ikiwiki.info.git] / doc / bugs / transitive_dependencies.mdwn

diff --git a/doc/bugs/transitive_dependencies.mdwn b/doc/bugs/transitive_dependencies.mdwn
index c61afe81e922947d9a2cc454752312fff5e072b6..0a2e9ec2896176658a2a94f7c44b5921d54b03b8 100644 (file)
--- a/doc/bugs/transitive_dependencies.mdwn
+++ b/doc/bugs/transitive_dependencies.mdwn
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 If a sidebar contains a map, or inline (etc), one would expect a
-change/add/remove of any of the mapped/inlined pages to cause a full wiki
+add/remove of any of the mapped/inlined pages to cause a full wiki
 rebuild. But this does not happen.
 
 If page A inlines page B, which inlines page C, a change to C will cause B
@@ -25,9 +25,15 @@ everything uses) will just result in semi-redundant dependency info being
 recorded. If we make destpage mandatory to fix this, goofing up will lead to
 this bug coming back. Ugh.
 
-Another approach to fix it could be to say that anything that causes a
+----
+
+## rebuild = change approach
+
+[[!template id=gitbranch branch=origin/transitive-dependencies author="[[joey]]"]]
+
+Another approach to fix it is to say that anything that causes a
 rebuild of B is treated as a change of B. Then when C is changed, B is
-rebuilt due to dependencies, and in turn this means A is rebuild because B
+rebuilt due to dependencies, and in turn this means A is rebuilt because B
 "changed". 
 
 This is essentially what is done with wikilinks now, and why, if a sidebar
@@ -40,8 +46,23 @@ here:
        building contact.mdwn, which depends on sidebar
        ...
 
-The only downside I can see with this approach is that it involves more work.
-Does the dep resolver have to keep looping until no new pages are rebuilt?
-Seems worth a try to implement this approach.
+Downsides here:
+
+* Means a minimum of 2x as much time spent resolving dependencies,
+  at least in my simple implementation, which re-runs the dependency
+  resolution loop until no new pages are rebuilt.
+  (I added an optimisation that gets it down to 1.5X as much work on
+  average, still 2x as much worst case. I suppose building a directed
+  graph and traversing it would be theoretically more efficient.)
+* Causes extra work for some transitive dependencies that we don't
+  actually care about. This is amelorated, but not solved by 
+  the current work on [[todo/dependency_types]].
+  For example, changing index causes
+  plugins/brokenlinks to update in the first pass; if there's a second
+  pass, plugins/map is no longer updated (contentless dependencies FTW),
+  but plugins is, because it depends on plugins/brokenlinks.
+  (Of course, this is just a special case of the issue that a real
+  modification to plugins/brokenlinks causes an unnecessary update of
+  plugins, and could be solved by adding more dependency types.)
 
---[[Joey]] 
+[[done]] --[[Joey]]