Make blacksmith optional

[Kobzol]

Pretty much everytime I build/serve the Forge when I want to change something, I have to wait for blacksmith to download Rust releases. It's so annoying that I actually see this as a contribution roadblock to the Forge :) New stable releases are released every six weeks, and for local development you don't care about having the releases downloaded 99.99% of the time, so I really don't think we need to update the cache every hour. You can always just flush the cache by removing the JSON file.

[rustbot]

r? @ehuss

rustbot has assigned @ehuss.
They will have a look at your PR within the next two weeks and either review your PR or reassign to another reviewer.

Use r? to explicitly pick a reviewer

[apiraino]

I also find it strange that to build this documentation website I need to download about 60mb to build a cache file. The cache seems to have the complete matrix of rustc builds for all versions ever (was implemented in #249). I struggle to understand what is this file used for.

Any help?

[Kobzol]

It's essentially used for automating the generation of this page and a few other pieces of information. It's mostly only useful for CI, so we could also just make it optional, e.g. based on CI=1, and if someone wanted to develop blacksmith, they could just pass the flag.

[apiraino]

ah ok understood. Another option (but I don't know how much work would it be), that file could be generated and stored server-side. blacksmith could just download it (with gzip compression is just 1,3KiB)

[Kobzol]

Well, it also contains the nightly and beta releases, so it changes at least ~once per day, so we would have to run some cron job on the repo or something to keep it up-to-date 😆 I would just do the simpler thing and increase TTL, or make it be optional.

[apiraino]

In any case, what blacksmith is, does and why would probably be a good thing to mention briefly in the README

[apiraino]

or make it be optional.

I vote for this

[ehuss]

or make it be optional.

I think I would also vote for this. I find it pretty annoying, and the number of people who need to work on the rendering of that releases page is much smaller than the number of people who work on the forge in general.

[Kobzol]

Ok, made blacksmith CI only and documented it a bit.

[Kobzol]

Ok, should be ready now.

[apiraino]

now builds in 1s (lol)