Re: BUG: git clean -d cannot remove files from read-only directories

[Elijah Newren <newren@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 10:58 AM Adam Milazzo
<Adam.Milazzo@microsoft.com> wrote:
>
> > It is how UNIX-like filesystem works, isn't it?
>
> Sure, but it doesn't have to be how "git clean -d" works. In particular, "git clean -ffd" could be more forceful, or there could be another option or a third level of force beyond the current two levels.
>
> It really comes back to this question: "How can I avoid the failure, given that I am running 'git clean' from a script and not interactively?" The only answer I could find that's not unreasonable is to parse the text output of 'git status -s' to find the untracked directories and then run 'chmod -R u+w' on each of those directories before running 'git clean -d'." I can do that, but I still think a "force" (or other) flag that really forces the cleanup would be preferable, especially given that this isn't a completely idiosyncratic scenario but one that will happen more and more as go modules are adopted (unless go is changed to stop putting them in read-only directories).


Tying permission override to e.g -ffd would be a really bad idea.
People would start adopting that for the permission override reason,
then someone is going to accidentally nuke a git submodule with
unpushed changes.

Tying it to -fd doesn't have that particular problem, but I'm worried
a bit about a slippery slope if we do it.  If we say that "git clean
-fd" should check and modify directory permission bits, should it also
check and modify any necessary ACLs?  What if the user in question
doesn't have perms, but the user in question is in sudoers -- should
git try to see if they can run chown or chattr under sudo too?

Also, another way to look at this; currently 'git clean -fd' behaves
the same on untracked directories as 'rm -rf' does and I think that's
a good model for how to behave.  Why should they be different?

$ git clean -fd unwritable-dir/
warning: failed to remove unwritable-dir/a: Permission denied
warning: failed to remove unwritable-dir/b: Permission denied
warning: failed to remove unwritable-dir/c: Permission denied
$ rm -rf unwritable-dir/
rm: cannot remove 'unwritable-dir/a': Permission denied
rm: cannot remove 'unwritable-dir/b': Permission denied
rm: cannot remove 'unwritable-dir/c': Permission denied