Re: [PATCH v4 08/19] tools/docs: sphinx-build-wrapper: add a wrapper for sphinx-build

[Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@oracle.com>]

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