Re: [Fink-beginners] Cleaning up failed builds?

[Alexander H. <ale...@gm...>]

On 12/23/13 6:16 PM, Mark D. McKean wrote:
> I was doing a sweep of my hard drive today, looking for stuff that might
> be unexpectedly eating up space. And OmniDiskSweeper said there was 2
> gigs in /sw/src/fink.build. When I looked at it, I saw several folders
> there the names of which corresponded to packages I had attempted to
> build but which had failed. All of the packages in question had since
> been fixed and successfully built, or I had at least temporarily given
> up on them, but the incomplete build files remained there.
>
> I checked the man page for fink, but couldn't find any commands or
> options that claimed to delete failed or uncompleted builds. I ran "fink
> cleanup --all", but those failed builds were not among the items removed.
>
> So my question is twofold:
>
> 1) Is there any risk in my simply rm'ing those failed builds directly?
> As I mentioned, the packages in question have since been built
> successfully (or abandoned), so there shouldn't be any reason to keep
> the failed builds around, but I don't know if there's some internal
> index fink keeps that might get messed up if I manually delete them.
>

It's completely safe to rm or Trash them.  They only get kept around 
because they potentially contain useful debugging information, and 
nothing else should be using them--if that happens it's a packaging error.

> 2) Is there an option or command somewhere that I'm missing, something
> that would remove failed builds either automatically upon failure or
> manually on command? Or is manually rm'ing failed builds out of
> /sw/src/fink.build periodically the only way to keep them from hanging
> around indefinitely? If there is no built-in option, is that something
> that could be looked at as a possible additional mode for cleanup? Or is
> there some reason I'm not aware of to keep failed builds around?
>
> Mark D. McKean
> qp...@qu...
>

There's not a currently such a fink mode, so manual removal is currently 
the only option.

"Automatically on failure" is undesirable, for the reason I mentioned 
earlier--there is quite a bit of information that can be grabbed from 
the build directory in the even of a failure, so it's best to leave it 
around.

I can't think of a good reason why it shouldn't be a "cleanup" option, 
though.  A situation where revision A fails on some platform and then 
the fix entails revsion A+1, say, which leaves the revision A build 
directory behind is pretty common.
-- 
Alexander Hansen, Ph.D.
Fink User Liaison
My package updates: http://finkakh.wordpress.com/