Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] xen: Improvements to clean and distclean targets

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 9:38 AM, Ian Campbell <ian.campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, 2016-01-19 at 01:43 -0700, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> > > > On 18.01.16 at 19:19, <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > On 18/01/16 16:57, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> > > > > > On 18.01.16 at 17:45, <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > > > On 18/01/16 16:41, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> > > > > > > > On 18.01.16 at 17:27, <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > > > > > * Move '*~' and 'core' into the find rule.
>> > > > > I don't understand this part: Where in the build process do such
>> > > > > get
>> > > > > generated? I'm tempted to instead recommend to just drop those
>> > > > > from the rm invocation...
>> > > > No idea about 'core' files, but *~ are emacs backup files.
>> > > But emacs should clean up after itself; this shouldn't be the job
>> > > of our clean rule.
>> >
>> > Why? the point is to have a one-revision old version of the file to
>> > hand.
>>
>> I guess there may be different strategies here: My editor also
>> creates such named files, but deletes them as the program gets
>> shut down. I.e. the one-revision old backup exists as long as the
>> program is running. I can see benefits from the alternative
>> model, but still it shouldn't be our scripts to clean up such backups.
>> After all - what if another program used another name patter for
>> its backups? Would we go clean those up then too?
>
> IMHO these files should be in .gitignore (so they don't clutter "git
> status", AFAICT this is already done correctly) but it's not really
> necessary for "make clean" (or distclean) to get rid of them, that's up to
> either the editor or the user. IOW I'd be happy removing the existing
> rules.

As an emacs user, I agree with this.  The purpose of "make clean" IMO
is be to make sure that the *build* operates cleanly (i.e., doesn't
end up using any output generated from a previous build), not to get
rid of extraneous random files that don't affect the build.  "git
clean" is the proper tool for cleaning out the tree for git commands.

 -George

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