[Cook] Help wanted with unorthodox use of cook

[Reuben Thomas]

I have a slightly unusual use for cook, but I'm a complete newbie to it and 
have little idea how to go about using it for this purpose. I have a very 
simple web-templating system to which I want to add support for generated 
files, but it occurred to me that this is just reinventing the wheel. 
However, apart from cook, none of the make-like systems I investigated 
seemed able to straightforwardly do what I want, namely:

1. Have a single top-level makefile that worked for a complete directory 
hierarchy.

2. Process non-standard includes dependencies.

Having studied the cook manual and introduction I discovered that cook 
handles 1 fine, and probably can do 2 easily, but I'd appreciate any 
pointers the experts can give.

Basically, includes work like this in my system: suppose a file 
foo/bar/baz/bob.html contains "$include{fragment}". Then a file called 
"fragment" is searched for in the following directories, in the following 
order: foo/bar/baz, foo/bar, foo, <root>.

So, it's pretty easy to see how to write a script to generate the 
dependencies (it's just a simplified version of the program I already wrote, 
called nancy: http://rrt.sc3d.org/Software/Nancy). It then needs to be run 
on each file in each leaf directory of the hierarchy (the "leaf 
directory=web page" rule means that every web page can have per-page 
includes that don't conflict with any other page's includes). The simplest 
thing I can think of is writing a script that a) finds all the leaf 
directories, and b) finds the includes as above. Indeed, I already have 
such a script. But I was wondering if that's overkill given cook's 
capabilities. It then remains to tell cook how to produce an output file; 
the other important detail is that, in order to avoid confusion and allow 
fragments to use the same file suffix as web pages, to avoid having to 
reprogram editors or file associations, I only do out-of-tree "builds", but 
again, cook seems able to cope.

What I'd really appreciate is some moderately precise pointers on how best 
to implement each element of this scheme, but any help would be much 
appreciated, including of course any mistakes I seem to have made about 
cook. I hope to end up with nancy written in cook as a single generic 
Howto.cook file that I can use instead of nancy, adding per-project build 
rules as necessary for projects that generate include files by other (more 
traditional!) means; the motivating example in my case is HTML fragments 
generated from XML.

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