IMO, I like@AlexWaygood 's proposal to have the list be an excludelist instead (i.e. a.nitignore 🤣 ) and then havetouch all files in/Docs and possibly/Misc/NEWS that matched a certain glob (i.e.**/*.rst) and didn't match one of the paths in the excludelist? That's a little more complicated, but it ensures new files are checked by default, highlight the files that still need to be fixed, and will reduce rather than increase the length of the list over time, and we can also use comments to explicit document why certain files are excluded (e.g. the two you mention above).

I tested with all of those, but found thattouching two clean files (main/Doc/includes/wasm-notavail.rst andmain/Doc/whatsnew/changelog.rst) caused a cascade effect and resulted in a number of dirty files being rebuilt too, and failing the build.

Just to explain why this is, for the record—the wasm statement gets injected into numerous individual files, so when it gets touched, all those dependents need to be rebuilt too, and touching the changelog means it rebuilds it from all the source files inMisc/NEWS. And the changelog most certainlyisn't clean, it just doesn't show up in the output because it is generated dynamically from numerous source files and thus evidently doesn't get checked itself (but the source files do).

Agreed, let's get this merged before new warnings appear and refactor in followup.

Status check is done, and it's a success ✅.