Usability Of NOCLEAN

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 12:37 PM -0600 3/6/04, Peter Schultz wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm just curious about the usability of NOCLEAN.  If I've just
>updated world and things are fine with the installation, is it
>considered safe to use NOCLEAN?

If we thought that behavior was always safe, then that would
be the default behavior.  It is not the default behavior,
because it is not always safe...

>A couple updates to libc came in this morning just after I
>installed a fresh world and I'm wondering what others do in
>cases like this.

I rarely use NOCLEAN.  If there *are* problems due to some
junk being left around, then the time I will lose to debugging
those problems is bound to be much larger than the amount I
save by using NOCLEAN.  (and I have run into such problems,
back when I did make NOCLEAN builds much more often).

The only times I use NOCLEAN is if something died in buildworld
or installworld.  If I can find the ONE update to fix that
problem, then I'll fix it and use NOCLEAN to rebuild world.  I
do not cvsup for "all new updates", though.  I only pick up
the update(s) which fix the specific problem I'm seeing.  It
is very annoying to cvsup to pick up one fix, only to find
out that you also picked up a *different* breakage...

I doubt I would ever use NOCLEAN for updates to libc.  My
feeling is that if I don't have time to do a normal build,
then I also won't have the time to deal with any problems
that might come up from a NOCLEAN build.

There is *always* another set of "interesting-looking" updates
being committed to freebsd.  If I have just finished a successful
buildworld, then I almost always wait at least a week before
I do another one.

This is only describing my own habits, of course.  Obviously
there are many times when you *can* get away with a NOCLEAN
build.  It's one of those things which is very useful when
you know what you're doing, but it isn't always safe to do.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu