Several things going on in this thread (which is just fine, Johan!).

1.  Doc rebuilds

Good to see this being addressed, and thanks to Georg for the
explanation.  I like Simon's idea, but I'd make killing the docs an
active choice (especially if the extra rebuilding gets "fixed")

sage -clone -nodoc

Or Robert's suggestion to wait for a first request, which I think was
once the de facto situation (not by design).


2.  -tnew

Not in the developer walkthrough since I didn't know about it when I
wrote that.  Limited testing indicates it looks for changed files in
the mercurial repository that have not been commit'ed and tests
those.  It strikes me that looking for dependencies is a big job -
there is no automatic way to see if any particular test, does, or does
not, use a particular file/module without examining every function/
method call, and vice-versa (ie which functions appear in which
tests).  In other words, there is not something easy like import
statements or included header files to follow.  You can put any
function in any doctest in any file.  But I could be wrong about this.

I think this is a bit dangerous to include in introductory
documentation, as it gives the impression this might be sufficient
testing?  I tend to test the file(s) I am editing, then maybe a whole
portion of the sage library tree when I'm close to done, and
everything before submitting something critical (like linear algebra
code).  I think a human/mathematician can make a fairly informed guess
about how much to doctest, and always err on the side of too much.
And somebody new would be wise to doctest everything initially.  That
said, I'll look into addressing the ticket referenced above.


3.  Clones vs Queues

Two developers with significant experience on big projects (Robert,
David) have spoken up in defense of clones to isolate big projects
from little stuff, or little stuff from big projects.  I'll try to
make changes to the developer walkthrough promoting queues more
heavily, without ignoring clones.  But I'm unlikely to change the
order of the two topics as I think that would be too much of a rewrite
at the moment.

Rob

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