A couple thoughts.
- You can avoid building most of dojo (dijit, dojox) but I imagine you already know that
- This restriction you are facing seems odd. Isn't there some way you can just upload the specific JS files you are editing during development?
Maybe if you give more details on the client setup, I can help you brainstorm a way around this problem.
Update
Here's what I think you need: Customize Dojo Base in Build. This allows you to specify particular bits of the dojo base to include.
This works in pre-1.7, so you should be good.
Appears to be exactly what you want:
layers: [
{
name: "dojo.js",
customBase: true,
dependencies: [
]
},
// ... remainder of profile
]
This will give you the absolute bare minimum of dojo (which you still don't need for your dev scenario, but which will drastically reduce the amount of files processed).
For other use cases, you can use the dependencies
attribute to add in other stuff from dojo core.
Update 2:
Here's a couple build-time optimization suggestions:
1) Don't intern strings, and don't compress, when in dev.
There are arg values you can pass to avoid these time-consuming steps (example is for ant build):
<arg value="internStrings=false"/>
<arg value="layerOptimize=false"/>
2) Build to a ram disk to speed copying of files