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rust-lang / mdBook

Create book from markdown files. Like Gitbook but implemented in Rust
https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/
Mozilla Public License 2.0
17.89k stars 1.62k forks source link

Feature: suppress copying files by configuration #1156

Open FrankHB opened 4 years ago

FrankHB commented 4 years ago

I find no options to ignore specific files to be built. Similar problems for watch/serve commands were mentioned in #831, and the improvement of the [build] configuration was also suggested there. But I think this is still a different issue better to be tracked separately.

A workaround to this problem is to specify src to a subdirectory. This can work, but far from perfect. It is not pleasant for transition from a repository of documents (consisting of plenty of .md files in the root directory) already checked in, as moving the files from the root to the subdirectory leads to much noise in the VCS history.

(Moreover, relying on .gitignore is problematic. What if there is only .hgignore, for example?)

FrankHB commented 4 years ago

To be more specific, Butbucket serves the project wikis as Mercurial repositories, but the Markdown features are limited. So, I decide to rearrange the documents in some other forms (hopefully with HTML output). However, at least the original .md documents still work without any changes online. If mdbook does not copy files (like my local .hg directory) by default, I can just start to work by simply adding book.toml and SUMMARY.md. This is not possible without some dirty hacks, and the workaround mentioned above does not work well because it breaks the file layout and I have to edit some internal links to make sure it can still work as a wiki. Currently I work it around by symbolic links in a separate src directory out of the tree, which is still a bit annoying for maintenance.

FrankHB commented 4 years ago

Since the default behavior may be expected, I wish the configuration opt-in. This should not break any existing usage.

tv42 commented 3 years ago

I would love to use src = "." and not have unnecessary things like my build script or .gitignore copied into the output directory.

This repository contains very little else than the markdown files, I want them to be front and center, not in a subdirectory.

Bergmann89 commented 1 year ago

Any updates on this issue? Would love to have this feature too! :)

sanmai-NL commented 7 months ago

Can this be closed in favor of the more elaborated duplicate #1187?