Re: [PATCH] Make git-clean a builtin

> Thanks for the input.
>
> On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 06:31:36PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > This looks better, but I think you'd be even better off actually using the
> > "read_directory()" interface directly, instead of exec'ing off "git
> > ls-files" and parsing the line output.
>
> Perhaps, I'll take a look at how git-ls-files does it and see if I can
> do that directly.  Since I'm new to git (and C) it will probably take me
> a while to re-implement though.
>
> > I also would still worry a bit about 'chdir(x)' and 'chdir("..")', because
> > quite frankly, they are *not* mirrors of each other (think symlinks, but
> > also error behaviour due to directories that might be non-executable).
> > Now, admittedly, if a directory isn't executable, I can imagine other git
> > things having problems (anybody want to test?), but that whole pattern is
> > just very fragile and not very reliable.
>
> Yes it does seem fragile, but 'chdir("-")' doesn't work in C and I
> couldn't find any equivalents.  I actually did think about symlinks, and
> my code does do the right thing since I test if it is a directory before
> doing the 'chdir(x)'. Symlinks are therefore treated as normal files and
> removed.