> Arnout has started a thread about consolidating tasks some days
> ago. One of his proposals (and I'm all for it) was to merge delete and
> deltree into a single delete task.
Makes sense to me, too. One reason for keeping separate tasks might be to
minimize unwanted damage -- what someone has called "the principle of least
surprise".
> Do we keep different attributes for deleting files and dirs, i.e.
> <delete file="name" /> with no includes or excludes allowed and
> <delete dir="name" /> with all the MatchingTask stuff in place? I
> think we should do so to avoid accidents.
Again, makes sense.
> Should we set defaultexcludes to false by default when deleting a
> directory tree - my opinion is yes.
Agreed.
> Do we need a recurse attribute (don't think so, if you specify a dir,
> you obviously want to delete it)?
I think we might. The delete task (at least the "official" one -- I haven't
tried building from the latest sources) doesn't accept wildcards in the file
attribute (at least not on NT), so the only way to delete all Java class
files in a single directory but not its subdirectories would be
<delete dir="some/dir" recurse="false" includes="*.class" />
for reasonable values of "only", of course. :-) IMO setting recurse to true
by default would be appropriate.
> Do we need a purge attribute to delete empty dirs - I'm not decided on
> this?
I think so, though it could be set to true by default.
----------
Craig S. Cottingham
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stefan Bodewig [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 9:53 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Consolidated delete task (Re: make clean equivalent)
>
> [ relevant passages quoted above ]
