Ability to specify dependency targets to skip at the CLI

There are often times where I am developing a task at the end of a list of targets. During this temporary development I want to run the target frequently without running the targets it depends on. Naturally I comment out the .IsDependentOn for the task under development. However I’d strongly prefer to be able to specify -Target X -SkipTarget Y -SkipTarget Z or something similar. I don’t want to make any changes to the file on account of temporary development. This way I can commit as I make progress without forgetting to uncomment and recomment.

I’d also prefer not to build a hierarchy where Release depends on Test and ReleaseWithoutTest or introduce environment variables or any other kind of script boilerplate just for the sake of being able to temporarily skip a given target.

[petertiedemann]

I definitely think something like this needs to be supported. If you are running in a CI that naturally has pre-build, build, test and deploy phases, then you will typically want to single-target each of the corresponding tasks, while at the same time making it easy for local builds to run the whole thing with a single cmd.

[patriksvensson]

I have no objection to this. Would however prefer --skiptask.

At the moment this, would have to be a semicolon (or similar) separated string since we don’t (at the moment) support multiple keys with the same name in the arguments.

So it would be something like:

> cake.exe --skip=foo;bar;qux;baz