More skip options, fixes #1103

[michielbdejong]

This would require some tests before merging I guess, but let me know what you think!

[Ndpnt]

Hi @michiel,

Thanks for your suggestion, and apologies for the delayed response.

The options you suggest for skipping snapshots conflict with our second design principle, "Do not require trust in maintainers", as snapshots are fundamental to ensuring trust in our system. For this reason, we do not plan to enable them.

Regarding the "prerun" step, rather than allowing it to be skipped, which might be tempting due to its time cost, we see an intermediate solution in optimizing it. Instead of running it at every engine start, we could trigger it only when necessary, such as when the engine, its dependencies, or the service declaration change, to minimize its impact on runtime.

This step is crucial to ensure that technical or declaration-related updates, which may affect extracted versions without being meaningful, are not mixed with actual content changes. Our current process already differentiates these in version history, and, for instance, the engine does not send notifications for purely technical updates.

While we don’t have a timeline due to other priorities, we believe improving the step’s efficiency is a better approach than making it optional.

I’ll close this PR for now. Thanks again for your suggestions and for contributing to improve the engine! 🙂