I'm mainly thinking of CUPiD here, but this could be useful for any post-processing type workflow. "preview_namelists" could check if postprocssing files are available, and if so and RUN_POSTPROCESSING is true and if so run the buildnml for the post-processing suite.
A CUPiD issue that talks about this is here:
NCAR/CUPiD#371