Skip dependencies

[a1russell]

Oftentimes when I'm writing a new recipe, I'd like to re-run that task, and only that task. I don't want the dependencies to run because they might take a long time, and I know they're up-to-date.

Another way to say this is: I'd like a way to run the recipes specified explicitly given on the command line, without any dependencies. One example I can find of this feature is Fake's --single-target parameter.

I'm aware of several workarounds for this, but it would be very nice to have this feature baked in. To list a few of the workarounds, so that I might illustrate why I would like this feature:

1. Write the dependencies with something like entr so that they don't unnecessarily re-run, as suggested in Tracking Incremental Changes (Avoid re-running builds) #424. This requires me to focus on having very robust dependencies before focusing on the task that I'm actually trying to work on. Sometimes I'd rather write the whole tree quickly and then go back and add such niceties.
2. Split each of my recipes into two. One which is my recipe, containing no dependencies. The second recipe includes the dependencies and includes the first recipe as the final dependency. This makes the justfile much less readable, though. Not great to maintain.
3. Comment out the dependencies as I'm developing the task. This works until I forget to uncomment them when I'm done.

[casey]

This seems useful, and also very easy to implement. As far as the name of the flag goes, --no-deps or --only could be good.

[a1russell]

Thank you for the reply @casey. If I were to create a PR for this, you would be willing to consider it, then?

[casey]

Oh yeah, definitely. Check out the tests in tests/. The easiest thing to do is add some tests, and then open a draft PR to get feedback on the functionality before you actually implement it. I think the main cases to test are:

• Normal dependency doesn't run when you pass --flag
• Prior depdencies (bar in foo: && bar doesn't run when you pass --flag)

[casey]

Feel free to ping me if you have any issues!

[a1russell]

Thank you @casey. Since I didn't get to start on this immediately, I thought I'd give an update. I might be a bit slow, as I don't have a lot of free time, but I'll definitely get around to this! 😄

[casey]

@a1russell No worries at all!

[nogweii]

I believe this can be closed now that #1819 was merged. 😄

[a1russell]

Yep, I feel bad I never got around to this. Life got in the way. Thanks @ngharrington!