Proposal for making flatpak-builder more workable for development workflows and other IDEs

[refi64]

TL;DR: There are two ideas I have to make using flatpak-builder easier for both IDEs and command-line tools.

Right now, if I modify a module in a Flatpak, the entire thing is rebuilt. This is great for build consistency, but terrible when it's the module for the project you're working on. GNOME Builder works around this by using --stop-at= to stop at the current module and then running flatpak build manually. Of course, this is very much specific to GNOME Builder.

Another problem is parsing the manifests. Flatpak-builder now supports both JSON and YAML, meaning that any IDE with built-in Flatpak support has to both parse both formats in the exact same way, as well as resolve all the imported module files.

Here's my idea to solve the two problems:

• flatpak-builder --reuse-build-dirs=module-name will reuse the same build directory for the given module. This would basically set up all the sources, then do a build, all in the build directory that was used before.
• flatpak-builder --dump-manifest my-manifest would parse the manifest (either JSON or YAML), parse all the modules that are in separate files, put them all together, and print out the resulting JSON.

Thoughts? :grin: