Re: Cleaning up make clean's behavior

[Mark H Weaver]

address@hidden writes:

> As running make clean breaks the bootstrap script.
> I propose we leverage git's shallow clones (git clone --depth 1 $URL)
> and include the .git directory with the repo such that we could simply
> have make clean check for git and if it exists run git clean -xdf and
> then only if git fails to exist, fallback to the existing broken form;
> which needs to be corrected.

I don't think we should change "make clean" to delete files in the
working directory that were not created by our build system.

I, for one, keep many files of notes and draft patches in my Guix
working directory.  I've been doing this for years.  If "make clean"
were suddenly changed to delete all of these files, I would lose data
and probably be very angry.

I happened to see this message, but if I had been focused on other
things, I might well have missed it.  It's not practical for us to
ensure that everyone is warned about this proposed change, so there's no
way for us to avoid the risk that valuable user data would be deleted.

Therefore, we should reject this proposal.

In general, we should be *very* reluctant to delete files that we know
nothing about.  We should be reluctant to do it even if there were a
very compelling reason for it.  Simply wanting to clean up to avoid
unsightly clutter falls far short of a compelling reason.

Thoughts?

      Mark