Validation

mill checks that your lexicographer files are syntactically and semantically valid. For how to validate lexicographer files, run

mill validate --help

Notice that validation occurs in steps; some validation steps can only be performed after the previous ones have completed without errors. This may cause an increase in the number of errors after errors are fixed (these errors were already there but were only detected after the previous validation step was performed). For example, we only check if synsets are sorted after checking that their words are themselves sorted (if they are not, there’s not point in checking if the synsets are sorted).

mill caches the files it validates; whenever a new validation is run, the files that were unchanged are not read directly from the files, but are read from the cache, which speeds up validation. The cache is stored in a .cache directory. The use of caching entails the risk of cache invalidation; whenever there is a change in the software the cache might become invalid. mill reports when errors like these occur, but it’s good practice to delete the cache whenever the software is updated or if there’s some unexpected error (if the error persists, open an issue, but trying deleting the cache first).