Re: Feature request - SVN command to clean a working copy of all unversioned and ignored files and directories

On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:14:04 +0000, David Weintraub wrote:
...
> So, it's possible for someone to write a Subversion client that does
> do a "clean up".

So, what you're saying is that, because it is possible to implement
'svn cleanup' on top of the svn client libs, the official svn client
won't get such a feature? (This immediately begs the question why
there is an svn CLI client at all, and not just the library. ;-)

...
> However, it is still the developer's responsibility to make sure that
> their "clean" target cleans everything.

No actually; 'make clean' is responsible to clean up everything that
make produced, not 'everything', like editor backup files (or the
remains of aborted merges).

A 'throw out everything unversioned' VCS command comes in quite
handy when

- you switched branches before calling 'make clean' because now the
  .o file of some source existing only in one branch will be left over,

- you're simply trying to get 'make clean' to actually work and don't
  want to iterate through the 'svn status' output each time.

And 'remove; make new checkout' isn't always a valid workaround because
you may want to keep local modifications of versioned files.

Summary: There are a lot of reason not to implement a 'scrub the WC
of unversioned files', but in my opinion "it's not our job" isn't one
of them.

Andreas

-- 
"Totally trivial. Famous last words."
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@*.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:21 -0800