Forresters, Is it possible to generate only the pages in a Forrest site whose corresponding source files have been changed since the last static site build? Or at least prevent updating the last modification time on generated, static pages that have not been changed since the last static site build?
I suppose this might be more of a Cocoon question than Forrest. In any case, the practice of generating every page, regardless of whether it has been changed, causes problems for publishing the static site build because all the local files have a newer modification time than the remote files on the Web host's FTP server. I am using lftp's reverse mirror function to synchronise the local site build with the public Web site. I have to tell lftp to ignore file timestamps when determining which local files need to be uploaded. If I do not, lftp will unnecessarily upload all local files because of the newer local timestamps. Having lftp ignore file timestamps works until a local file has been changed without changing the file size. In this case, lftp does not check whether the local file has been changed. Instead, lftp skips uploading this local file because it has the same size as the remote file. If the last modification time was changed only for pages that have been changed, this would permit lftp to use the local timestamps to determine which local files need to be uploaded. This also means that the same file size problem is avoided. Thanks, Brolin
