Re: Feature request: confirm data loss when renaming folder with ignored files

Em [2023-07-12 qua 07:59:02-0400], Greg Troxel escreveu:

> I think the answer is probably more or less "because ignored files are
> not important, by the definition of what should be ignored."

Then I suggest, at least, prominently document this interpretation.

> Why are you declining to sync something that is important, while wanting
> to sync the containing directory?  I really am curious, because I find
> that people are wanting to use ignore all the time, in ways that don't
> make sense to me.

The offending directive was:

ignore = Path unison-stow-folding/emacs/.elfeed/*

As the name suggests, I use Unison to sync my dotfiles between personal
notebook and my workstation, and GNU Stow to deploy them as symlinks.
For the Emacs Stow package I used the /folding/ feature of GNU Stow.
That would make the directory ~/.elfeed itself a symlink to
~/unison/unison-stow-folding/emacs/.elfeed.

But I did not want to synchronize everything in ~/.elfeed.  Now I don't
remember what I thought at the time; maybe I intended to synchronize
Elfeed's configuration and metadata (such as tags) while leaving out the
feed database which weighs some dozens of megabytes and didn't need to
by synchronized via unison.  I now realize I should have left ~./elfeed
out of unison.

Then recently I reorganized my dotfiles GNU Stow packages, and this
triggered the data loss.  *If* I remember correctly, on my workstation
(which indeed didn't have Elfeed's database synchronized) I have renamed
~/unison/unison-stow-folding/emacs/.elfeed
to
~/unison/home-stow-folding/all::emacs/.elfeed
then synchronized it to my laptop.

> One approach might be to make removing a directory fail if it is
> non-empty (with the files that are supposed to be recreated moved
> first).  This will turn your data loss scenario into an annoyance for
> many, but that seems reasonable.  It is reasonably likely that it is a
> small change, basically rmdir instead of rm -rf, or just declining to
> enumerate and clean up.  It's also reasonaly likely that it will cause a
> lot of complaints.

Maybe you could add a "cautious" command line option or configuration
directive?

Regards!

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