Re: [PATCH v7 00/10] interactive git clean

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: May 8, 2013, 16:08 UTC
Message-ID: <7vwqr9fo9b.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAPig+cR6aa+xODi=8DoiBpqQZM1eBHkGBvGzMGB2PSiT3osMEw@mail.gmail.com>

Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 7:38 AM, Jiang Xin <worldhello.net@gmail.com> wrote:
>> When the command enters the interactive mode, it shows the
>> files and directories to be cleaned, and goes into its
>> interactive command loop.
>
> Your current implementation only allows excluding items from the list
> of files to delete. If you accidentally exclude some file which you
> actually want in the deletion list, there is no way to re-add it.

If you accidentally dropped items from the list, is it such a big deal? I would imagine, if I were in that situation, that I would simply continue and concentrate on making sure the remaining list does not include anything I want to keep, clean them and then run the command again, at which point the list of untracked paths in the list will be much smaller.

We cannot make the same argument against the approach to first present a list and _remove_ items that should not be dropped. That is a genuine improvement, without which you cannot do a similar incremental removal, whose first invocation removes only a subset (but still a subset with no precious files you need to keep) of files to allow the list subsequent invocations presents to *shrink*.

Cleaning all unneeded files inside a single interactive session should *never* be the goal---that will lead to an over-engineered design (e.g. switching "clean -x" flags in the middle? why?). I think Jiang's latest series is already way over-engineered, and I suspect your suggestion leads it more into that direction.