Re: [PATCH] Documentation/git-clean.txt: don't mention deletion of .git/modules/*

On Mon, Feb 08, 2016 at 05:36:50PM -0500, Matt McCutchen wrote:

On Mon, 2016-02-08 at 14:22 -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

quoted

Matt McCutchen [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I found no evidence of such behavior in the source code.

Signed-off-by: Matt McCutchen <redacted>
---

That was added last year at bcd57cb9 (Documentation/git-clean.txt:
document that -f may need to be given twice, 2015-02-26).  It would
be better to know what got changed since then--that is, was the
additional text unnecessary even back then, or we made changes to
the system since then and forgot to remove the added text.

Mikko, is this need to give -f twice still the case?

I know you probably want confirmation from Mikko, but I'll offer my
understanding.  There were two statements added in bcd57cb9:

1. -f may need to be given twice to delete nested worktrees and
embedded repositories.  This is still true.

2. Deletion of submodule repositories under .git/modules is conditional
on -f being given twice.  AFAICT, this was wrong even back then: "git
clean" has never deleted such repositories under any conditions.

This is the use case which I've used double -f at work with several build
jobs but with older 1:1.7.9.5-1ubuntu0.2 (Ubuntu 12.04) and 1:1.9.1-1ubuntu0.2
(Ubuntu 14.04) versions of git.

But I can confirm that git version 1:2.7.0~rc3-1 (Debian unstable) is no
longer removing the git submodule trees from .git/modules with double -f.

At work, we really want to remove the .git/modules subtrees since we want to
test changes to .git/modules structure via normal commits to the git trees.
Thus we need a way removing all non-tracked files from the git tree
which includes obsolete (or for test only) git submodule trees.

I will test the old versions tomorrow again. Maybe in older git versions
the code path from 1) deletes also the git modules from 2).

-Mikko