Dependencies between templates

[domenkozar]

Goals:

• Ability to use multiple templates at the same time and depend on them (similar to Templer structures, but uses templates as structures you can depend on)
• Ability to have logic that decides what files get rendered

Implementation:

• variables and defaults are passed to all templates and all questions are collected from the dependency templates
• issue Configurator for each template given global settings
• keep ordered Configurator.dependencies list of templates
• provide include/exclude options for files
• pre/post hooks for executing dependencies
• document local commands can be used as simple as just commands inside a project
• test for multi inheritance
• specify [templates] section something like::

    [template]
    dependency.foobar.template = bobtemplates.foobar/
    dependency.foobar.destination = foobar/
    dependency.foobar.include = **
    dependency.foobar.pre_render_dependency = ....
    dependency.foobar.post_render_dependency = ....
    dependency.licenses.template = bobtemplates.licenses
    dependency.licenses.destination = .

[domenkozar]

This is a blocker for 0.1 release.

[domenkozar]

There is also an use case to reuse existing mr.bob template and change only a few things: for example add some questions, etc.

Example for PasteScript:

class FreeBsdTemplate(HostBsdBaseTemplate):
    """."""
    _template_dir = 'tmpl/BSD/FreeBSD'
    defaults = getdefaults('FreeBSD')
    summary = "A FreeBSD doc template."

    vars = HostBsdBaseTemplate.vars + \

[djowett]

I think that this risks making templates horrible to maintain. You would have problems like the main template not be able to change because other templates depended on it's variables, then if you did change variables, you would need version pins between templates.

I might not be thinking the above through thoroughly, but mrbob is nice principally because it's simple - IMO this goes the way of paster/zopeskel making it too complex to maintain beyond a few experts, for not much benefit. Am I wrong?