FW: darcs patch: Add extern flag to avoid multiple symbolerrors on Mac...

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 12:23 +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:
> > 2008/9/8 Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>:
> >> The obvious solution to both is to somehow offer 'make superclean', which removes every single 
> >> file and directory that is not in the source repo.   That is right-by-construction, and stays 
> >> right regardless of changes.   I don't know how to implement it though -- and of course any sort 
> >> of automated 'rm' is anxious-making.
> >
> > When we switch to git, "git clean -x" will accomplish this. I don't
> > know if Darcs has an equivalent feature.
> 
> I think it is important to understand that proper cleaning in
> a system that doesn't track all dependencies isn't trivial.
> There are no easy solutions that do not require proper
> maintainance to keep working.

Right, and even when we do track dependencies we lose track of things
when dependencies change. I think Cabal has basically the right approach
here by putting all generated files in one place. It should be refined
however so that we partition those generated files according to the
clean classes (at least clean and distclean) so that we can clean
without deleting shipped generated files for example, or keep the user's
configuration.

Duncan