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At a recent YUI Open Hours, there was a bit of discussion about how long it can take to build YUI. I ran a test today on my netbook, and building all of YUI3 took about 35 minutes.

In the discussion, EricF mentioned disabling jslint could save a fair amount of time.

This can be accomplished by giving lint.skip a value in the any individual projects build.properties file, or by running ant with the -Dlint.skip=true flag before the target.

However, it seems to be that the main reason the build takes so long, is that it insists on building modules that haven't changed. To address that, I've forked builder on GitHub here - http://github.com/foxxtrot/builder with a modification that checks for changes, and skips the build if it doesn't detect any changes in the src/ tree. If people could please pull my changes and test them, I want to exercise this modification a bit more before I issue a pull request. I've also held off on opening a bug, to be sure that this is a reasonable direction.

If you want to force a complete rebuild, the build.force property should be set.

By making builder faster, I think it becomes more likely that the entire build/ path can be excluded from the git repository, since that tends to be the most common source of merge conflicts, and as generated files they shouldn't be necessary. If anyone has any comments, or other ideas on ways to make builder faster, I hope we can have further discussion.