sitemap.xml generation incorrect date?

[thomashallam]

Bug description

When I use the command 'quarto publish' every post/page is recreated/updated in html, regardless of whether the page/content changed or not.

• Is this the correct/expected behavior?

using the above method, dates on the sitemap are not reflecting when the content was most changed

• how do you publish updates to some pages but not all pages (i.e. so the sitemap and dates are correct)?

another scenerio is you might change or remove a category on one page, quarto publish would regenerate every since post page and the sitemap. the underlying content technically didn't change on the pages, only meta-data displayed in one page

• why does this scenario record that the page/post content change for every page?

it seems that sitemap updated dates should relate to content, not navigation/meta-data ?

Thanks

Tom

vscode+extension windows 11 github/actions

Checklist

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[dragonstyle]

Note - it looks like we are using the last modified time of the output file when creating the sitemap. It probably makes more sense to use the last modified date from the input file since the output file may be recreated by a render anytime the site is published.

[dragonstyle]

This had pretty negative performance implications so I'm having to revert it. I will try to improve the performance and fix it once again.

(Reverted here 063c6a1422883a229f091bc949a9690c7b2318d1)

[HenrikBengtsson]

I'm coming here for similar reasons. I use https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-actions to re-render a Quarto website once an hour. When there's no change in content, the sitemap.xml is still updated, which triggers "noisy" hourly git commits, and possible other downstream artifacts, e.g. RSS feeds. It also triggers the GitHub Pages to rebuild and republish the site. So, noise and unnecessary processing follows from these timestamps.

This had pretty negative performance implications so I'm having to revert it. I will try to improve the performance and fix it once again.

Maybe both approaches could be supported via a setting in _quarto.yml, e.g.

format:
  html:
    sitemap-timestamps: input

while the default would be (as now):

format:
  html:
    sitemap-timestamps: output

? Next level up would be to make it a per-page setting in the yaml front matter.

[mcanouil]

@cscheid Should this be reopened?

[cscheid]

Yes, I closed it incorrectly, one way or another.