Re: Status of help.gnome.org and Pintail

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Tue, 2021-09-28 at 22:02 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi via gnome-doc-list wrote:

A few things I found out while playing with this, today:

- pintail is not really blazing fast, taking 15 minutes to build the site for the default C locale; but once translations are thrown in the mix it gets **really** slow. The full build takes 3 hours on the CI runner. I haven't looked at pintail in depth, but maybe we can speed it up a bit by running each language in parallel, or cloning all repositories in parallel with a threaded executor

So, it took me a few more weekends than I'd hoped, but I finally landed two changes that affect performance:

* Per ebassi's suggestion, Pintail can now do itstool translations in threads.

* Pintail can do build entire directories of Mallard files (effectively "documents") at once, instead of doing an xslt run for each page. This required yelp-xsl changes because of stylesheet-global params.

These are both behind config options, because they could cause bugs. But I tested on help.gnome.org until I got byte-for-byte equivalence. So I've now enabled them both.

On my most recent test builds, without these two features enabled, the build took 2 hours and 9 minutes. With these two features enabled, the build took 17 minutes. This could vary on build machines based on how many cores are available for threading. Still, I'm pretty happy with the speed improvement.

I'm still committed to revamping things. I'm just slow because work keeps me on other things.

--

Shaun