Hello Travis
Thanks for your efforts in the Help. The current Help development cycle
requires indeed a full build. I have nevertheless some shortcuts to offer.
A XHP editor is available to test and edit a Help file and render the
page. It is still work in progress but IMHO (false modesty) it serves
quite well to address small to medium changes in the XML.
The instructions are in the page
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/DocumentationHelpEditor
Since you cloned the Help repo, you can open a cloned Help file from the
editor File menu and edit it, then save it.
Another way to edit Help files is by editing/patching the Help file
directly in Gerrit (a friendly service on top of git), as explained in
the page
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/GerritEditing
Now with these 2 tools you can do a patch and play with the 2 together:
You can edit a Help file in the XHP editor and do all checks
(<-Important!). On another tab of your browser you can open the same
file in gerrit editor (this time the file is in the repository). The
good thing is that you can copy&paste from XHP editor to gerrit (and
vice versa) as they are pure text and both services use the same editor
(codemirror). This way you don't have to do command-line git wizardry
and you can submit the patch from gerrit.
I advise to read carefully the instructions of the wiki page, including
the references to the XHP tags.
Kind regards
Olivier