On Thursday, March 9, 2017 7:43:50 PM EST William L. Thomson Jr. wrote:
> On Thursday, March 9, 2017 7:08:12 PM EST Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> > Whether "-f" is appropriate or not depends on the context.
> > 
> > With firebird, you expect all of those directories to exist, and you
> > want to be notified (so that you can update the ebuild) if one of them
> > isn't there. If upstream unbundles those three libraries and you're
> > doing "rm -rf", then you'll never notice, and that (now pointless) line
> > of code will stay there forever.
> 
> I was assuming such. However that also means who ever is maintaining said
> package is not paying attention. Relying on || die to fail when/if one of
> those changes. Which I would think a safer way is to use -rf and not care if
> one is removed.
> 
> In this specific package is also related  to patches. Not just that bit in
> ebuild. Thus maintainer like would have noticed when patches failed. Seemed
> like needless nitpicking that just leads to confusion.

Along the lines of failures. What if a system has rm aliased to prompt before 
removal? In that case rm -r would fail, but rm -fr would not. That would cause 
failures for the user and not the developer. Assuming rm does not disable 
prompt for a non-interactive shell.

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.

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