On 12/09/2025 12:16, Jani Nikula wrote:

quoted

Here, any time increase is problematic, and SPHINXDIRS play an important
hole by allowing them to build only the touched documents.

This is actually problematic, because the SPHINXDIRS partial builds will
give you warnings for unresolved references that are just fine if the
entire documentation gets built.

I admit I don't have a full overview of all the problems that are being
solved here (in existing and proposed code), but how hard would it be to
convert the whole SPHINXDIRS thing into a Sphinx plugin that runs early
and discards documents outside of what the user wants to build? By
"discards" I mean in some useful way that reduces runtime compared to a
full build while retaining some benefits of a full build (reference
checking)?


Vegard