make doc re-builds all documentation even if only one source file has changed

[Stephen Biggs-Fox]

As per the title, make doc currently re-builds all documentation even if only one source file has changed. It would be better (faster) if make doc only re-built the parts of the documentation affected by the changes since the last make. I don’t know if this is easily done with make or if there is a utility to help with this, e.g. something similar to latexmk for LaTeX builds. It may be that getting this to work is more effort than it’s worth, in which case it’s fair enough to leave it as is. However, it is worth investigating to see if we can easily speed-up documentation re-builds.

[David Dickinson]

This isn’t currently supported by ford. Whilst it’s possible to hack together a system such that ford only looks at certain files this will not generally produce correct documentation as there is some “whole project” analysis that needs to be done to resolve references etc.

[Stephen Biggs-Fox]

Fair enough. Probably best to just leave it then. I’ll mark this as wontfix.

[Stephen Biggs-Fox]

Not supported by Ford. Lots of effort to fix it ourselves. Re-builds of documentation after a small change are rare enough that this effort is not worth it. Therefore, won't fix.