Incremental Build - CI/CD Glossary Definition
An incremental build rebuilds only the parts of a project affected by a change, reusing previously compiled outputs for everything else. It is the opposite of a clean (from-scratch) build.
In CI
Incremental builds are only safe when previous outputs are restored reliably, which is why they pair with a build cache. A stale or partial cache can make incremental builds produce wrong results, so many CI pipelines do clean builds on the main branch.
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