`docs` compilation time is too much for minor changes

[shravanngoswamii]

I was trying to preview docs after a very long time, it's taking hours to run all docs and I don't think it's worth waiting for this much time if someone just want to make a minor change! Is there any way we can shorten this time?

A bit of a manual approach, but I guess we can save the _freeze directory of latest commit from master branch somewhere (maybe in another branch or repo) and give option to contributors to download and put it in their docs folder locally. Maybe we can use submodules for this...!

cc @penelopeysm!

[penelopeysm]

I was trying to preview docs after a very long time, it's taking hours to run all docs

Do you mean locally?

[shravanngoswamii]

Do you mean locally?

Yes!

[penelopeysm]

I never really found a good solution for that :( apart from:

1. quarto render-ing individual QMD files
2. just letting my computer run everything while I went to sleep / lunch / meetings

The _freeze folder on my local checkout is 50 MB large, so I don't think we should be committing that to the repo. But perhaps we could manually create a release containing a zipped _freeze directory when the Manifest is changed? (_freeze is only valid for a particular Manifest) I think this should be easy enough to do with a GitHub action that is run on workflow_dispatch, it just needs to checkout the master branch, build the docs, then create a release with _freeze + the Manifest

Do you know if _freeze is OS-independent?

[shravanngoswamii]

just letting my computer run everything while I went to sleep / lunch / meetings

I did this yesterday and when I saw my laptop after like 4–5 hours, it was still stuck at 1st notebook, maybe there was some other issue!

Do you know if _freeze is OS-independent?

Most probably, it should be OS-independent because it only contains JSON and Javascript files! I am not 100% sure!

[penelopeysm]

Let's at least try it :)