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Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

The idea that git offers a 'clean' command was revelatory to me. Your build system probably shouldn't need to know how to restore your environment to a clean state because your source control should already know what a clean state is.

That's sort essential to serving its purpose, after all.

I haven't yet run into a scenario where there was a clean task that couldn't be accomplished by using flags to git clean, usually -dfx[0]. If someone has an example of something complex enough to require a separate target in the build system, I'm all ears.

[0] git is my Makefile effect program. I do not know it well, and have not invested the time to learn it. This says something about me, got, or both.

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The problem with `git clean` is -X vs -x. -x (lowercase) removes EVERYTHING including .env files and other untracked files. -X (uppercase) removes only ignored files, but not untracked files.

If there is a Makefile with a clean target, usually the first thing I do when I start is make it an alias for `git clean -X`.

Usually, you want to keep your untracked files (they are usually experiments, debugging hooks, or whatever).

You are almost certainly right that I was using -X. It's been a while since I had to deal with git.

This. I have no urge to have git "clean" my project, because I'll lose a ton of files I have created locally. Rather, I want the project know what it creates when it builds and have the ability to clean/purge them. It's a never ending source of frustration for me that "gradlew clean" only cleans _some_ stuff, and there's no real "gradlew distclean".

Hmm, I wonder what's the best way™ to, er "locally backup" those files, in such a way that no git-clean invocation will remove them without promoting.

All I can think of are things like periodically copying them to another folder, or give them a different ownership needed for edit/delete, etc.

Unless there's some kind of .gitpreserve feature...

You can have locally ignores files in .git/info/exclude IIRC.

I know there are local-only git settings, but AFAIK ignore-status won't protect files from being removed/overwritten by all possible git commands, it just means they won't be accidentally staged/committed.

make clean is supposed to clean the intermediary files only but keep the actual build targets (typically what you want to install)

You might want .INTERMEDIATE in that case.

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