Something about Ant

1. Perhaps it makes sense to add Ant if/unless namespaces to the build project root. Since DITA-OT Ant version is 1.9.7, these namespaces automacally open the possibility to use if and unless attributes on tasks and inner elements. Also Ant itself can be upgraded (http://ant.apache.org/antnews.html) (release notes https://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/).

2. Despite the fact that there is preprocess.mapref.skip property, we have no chance to skip mapref resolution. Because the keyref task contains its own mapref resolution pipeline (do we really need to resolve them twice?), and that one does not respond to preprocess.mapref.skip. It doesn’t affect the result of full preprocessing, but mapref resolution is likely to break ditamap validation in some cases. So for partial preprocessing it may be useful to have a possibilty to switch it off. With (1) it is quite simple:

<pipeline message="Resolve mapref in ditamap" taskname="mapref" unless:set="preprocess.mapref.skip">

1. The BranchFilterModule gives birth to a new (filtered) topics, which are added to the .job.xml. But the branch-filter task doesn’t rewrite file lists, they are rewritten later - in the chunk task. The chunk task execution depends on preprocess.chunk.skip property and can be skipped, then these new topics will never be exploded and processed. I think it would be useful to add the following lines to the end of the branch-filter task.

<job-helper file="fullditatopic.list" property="fullditatopiclist"/>
<job-helper file="fullditamapandtopic.list" property="fullditamapandtopiclist"/>

(2) и (3) will reduce the number of dependencies between tasks, so they can be easily switched off without breaking the output. It’s concered with this discussion.

[jelovirt]

1. File lists are deprecated and obsolete, they will be removed in 3.0. (Historical not, 3.0 was supposed to be released in 2016, but we pushed it back because we felt we didn’t have enough features for 3.0. It’s all PR, really.)

[jelovirt]

1. While we have a property to skip mapref processing, it’s retained for historical reasons. Many parts of preprocessing rely on mapref processing, and if you want to disable it, then you have to disable also e.g. keyref processing.