Re: what should "git clean -n -f [-d] [-x] <pattern>" do?

Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com> writes:

No need to be sorry ;-)

I actually think the true culprit of making this an odd-man-out is that the use of "-f" in "git clean", especially with its use of the configuration variable clean.requireForce that defaults to true, is utterly non-standard.

The usual pattern of defining what "-f" does is that the "git foo" command without any options does its common thing but refuses to perform undesirable operations (e.g. "git add ." adds everything but refrains from adding ignored paths). And "git foo -f" is a way to also perform what it commonly skips.

In contrast, with clean.requireForce that defaults to true, "git clean" does not do anything useful by default. Without such a safety, "git clean" would be a way to clean expendable paths, and "git clean -f" might be to also clean precious paths. But it does not work that way. It always requires "-f" to do anything. Worse yet, it is not even "by default it acts as if -n is given and -f is a way to countermand that implicit -n". It is "you must give me either -f (i.e. please do work) or -n (i.e. please show what you would do) before I do anything".

  $ git clean
  fatal: clean.requireForce defaults to true and neither -i, -n, nor -f given; refusing to clean

Given that, it is hard to argue that it would be a natural end-user expectation that the command does something useful (i.e. show what would be done) when it is given "-f" and "-n" at the same time. What makes this a rather nonsense UI is the fact that "-f" does not work the way we would expect for this command.