On Apr 4, 2005, at 11:34 AM, Michael G Schwern wrote:
For reference, this discussion started when Jos was looking for a MakeMaker target which deletes everything not in the MANIFEST.
I would never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever want that.
One could have distclean move the files to some unclean/ directory instead
of deleting them, or confirm before deleting, but really the point of
distclean is to make sure that "realclean" does in fact clean out the
distribution back to a pristine state.
I guess so. I was never really sure what it was for, I simply accepted a patch that added it along with some other MM actions I never use. I figured the worst that could happen is that a lot of other people won't use them either.
I certainly never assumed it was supposed to clean out your distribution for you, though. This brings to mind the people who try to clean out their brains with power drills, or their intestines with long bits of cloth - likely does more damage than good.
To that end, maybe "distclean" is misnamed.
I guess it depends on how you read it. If you read it as "clean the dist" or "make the dist clean", then yeah. But there's already a "clean" and "realclean" action for doing that. I'm not sure I can offer an alternate reading that makes any more sense though, so yeah, I guess it's misnamed.
Personally, I just have my upload tools do an ExtUtils::Manifest::filecheck() before uploading.
-Ken
