Sounds like a worthy cause. Do you have any stats on how much time is saved?
Definitely put it behind the --incremental flag to start. On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 2:43 PM, Jason Ginchereau <jason...@microsoft.com> wrote: > We've had a few customers complain that the dev inner loop for Cordova > apps is slow compared to native app development. So recently I've been > looking at ways to optimize it. The two largest pieces of a Cordova build > are "prepare" and "compile" phases. While there's not much we can > realistically do to speed up the native-code compilation (in which > gradle/xcodebuild/etc is invoked), it's clear that the prepare phase is not > nearly as efficient as it could be. So I opened a JIRA for that, and I have > a solution in the works that I want to get feedback on. > > CB-11117: Preparing platforms should skip copying files which haven't > changed<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CB-11117> > Many cordova CLI commands include a "prepare" operation, including > 'cordova build', 'cordova run', 'cordova plugin add', and more. Every time > each of those commands runs, the target platform is "prepared", which > involves copying all files from [<project>/www, > <project>/platforms/<platform>/platform_www, <project>/merges/<platform>] > to the platform's target www folder, as well as copying a bunch of icons > and splash screens to platform-specific locations. > > For the very first prepare of a platform, all that file copying is > necessary. But most of the time after that most of the files being copied > have not changed and therefore don't really need to be copied again. So the > typical developer inner loop (edit a few source files, build and run the > app, repeat) is a lot slower than it could be for a Cordova project, > especially one that includes a significant number of source files or > resources. > > Instead, Cordova should be smart enough to skip copying of files that > haven't changed, based on their last-modified timestamp. But there should > still be a way to force a clean/full/non-incremental copy if desired. To > preserve compatibility with all possible existing workflows, I'm leaning > toward keeping the full copy as the default behavior, and enabling the > optimization only with a new --incremental flag, at least initially. If we > find the incremental option is working well for everyone, we can promote > that behavior to default in a future major version update. > > See PRs here for implementation of this idea... > https://github.com/apache/cordova-lib/pull/429: Add FileUpdater module to > cordova-common > https://github.com/apache/cordova-android/pull/295: Use FileUpdater to > optimize prepare for android platform > I'll submit PRs for cordova-ios and cordova-windows platforms soon, as > well as a cordova-cli change to enable the optimization via a new > --incremental flag (assuming we don't want to make it the default behavior). > > Jason > >
