Re: [PATCH v7 00/10] interactive git clean

Eric Sunshine [off-list ref] writes:

On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 7:38 AM, Jiang Xin [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

When the command enters the interactive mode, it shows the
files and directories to be cleaned, and goes into its
interactive command loop.

Your current implementation only allows excluding items from the list
of files to delete. If you accidentally exclude some file which you
actually want in the deletion list, there is no way to re-add it.

If you accidentally dropped items from the list, is it such a big
deal?  I would imagine, if I were in that situation, that I would
simply continue and concentrate on making sure the remaining list
does not include anything I want to keep, clean them and then run
the command again, at which point the list of untracked paths in the
list will be much smaller.

We cannot make the same argument against the approach to first
present a list and _remove_ items that should not be dropped. That
is a genuine improvement, without which you cannot do a similar
incremental removal, whose first invocation removes only a subset
(but still a subset with no precious files you need to keep) of
files to allow the list subsequent invocations presents to *shrink*.

Cleaning all unneeded files inside a single interactive session
should *never* be the goal---that will lead to an over-engineered
design (e.g. switching "clean -x" flags in the middle? why?).  I
think Jiang's latest series is already way over-engineered, and I
suspect your suggestion leads it more into that direction.