1310328 - mach clobber should probably clobber both objdir and python by default

Status: NEW

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️) (PTO Dec 22 - Jan 2)]

I just checked out an old revision (about 2 months old) and did a clobber build, and when I tried to run a test on it, I got an error about "ImportError: No module named errors".

It turns out I needed to clobber some python stuff (maybe some .pyc files?)

| ./mach clobber python | does that, and it got me working.

But I think that ./mach clobber should probably, by default, clobber both the objdir and the Python stuff. Up until now, I've assumed (and I suspect I'm not alone), that ./mach clobber is a full nuke of my non-srcdir stuff. The fact that some Python stuff was left over was kinda surprising.

Comment 1

[Mike Conley (:mconley) (:⚙️) (PTO Dec 22 - Jan 2)]

ahal points out that I can do this for myself via my ~/.mozbuild/marchrc file by adding "clobber = clobber objdir python" under [alias].

That's great for me, but it might be worth just altering the default for everybody.

Comment 2

[Gregory Szorc [:gps]]

The main reason we don't do the full clobber by default is it requires walking the source directory to find VCS ignored files and this can be quite expensive - possibly more expensive than blindly deleting a directory tree. And it would blow away IDE files.

The correct solution is for the CLOBBER file/mechanism to denote which type of clobber is needed and have `mach clobber` honor that. I'm pretty sure there's an old bug on that somewhere. The even more correct solution is to never require clobbers at all :)

Comment 3

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

That said, bug 1188224 should work around these .pyc issues, and a mach clobber python shouldn't be necessary. It would be good to know why that doesn't work in this case.

Comment 4

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

We have mach clobber --full... which should probably do mach clobber python too (it doesn't)