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

[Mikko Rapeli <mikko.rapeli@iki.fi>]

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:
> > Matt McCutchen <matt@mattmccutchen.net> writes:
> > 
> > > I found no evidence of such behavior in the source code.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Matt McCutchen <matt@mattmccutchen.net>
> > > ---
> > 
> > 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