Keep .git when cleaning destinationDirectory

[netzwerg]

When publishing a Hakyll-based site to GitHub, it is very convenient to clone the master/gh-pages branch of the destination repo directly to the _site folder.

Taking my own blog as an example:

git clone -b source https://github.com/netzwerg/netzwerg.github.com.git 
cd netzwerg.github.com
git clone -b master https://github.com/netzwerg/netzwerg.github.com.git _site 

This allows to edit the sources, build the site, and publish the final pages from a single directory tree.

Unfortunately, cabal run clean wipes the complete _site folder (including the .git folder required for the above strategy to work).

The suggested change keeps a potentially existing _site/.git folder upon clean.

Disclaimer: I am new to Hakyll/Haskell, please refactor/refine/rewrite as needed -- tia!

[nagisa]

Such change was proposed multiple times and it was declined multiple times as well on the grounds of

• destinationDirectory being owned by hakyll;
• There existing multiple ways to track files inside directory without putting .git into it;
• many more special directories that might want to not be deleted.

[netzwerg]

Thanks for your clarifications. I must have missed the issues that already dealt with similar suggestions (or is there a mailing-list where these discussions are happening?).

[nagisa]

I believe none of the past proposals have moved past message on IRC (and we, sadly, keep no logs).

Keep in mind, that I have no decision-making power in this project and am just stating opinion that was prevalent a few months ago; I’d reopen this for now and see what @jaspervdj has to say on here 😊

[netzwerg]

Ok, l have re-opened it -- let's wait and see :-)

[jaspervdj]

I think you can use $GIT_DIR and $GIT_WORK_DIR for this, but I'm open to discussion. Thanks for handling this so far @nagisa.

[cryptica]

Keeping the .git folder in the destination directory would also allow to keep it as a submodule in the gh-pages branch of the same repo (as in https://github.com/shiftyp/submodule-gh-pages-example), therefore separating source and built files while keeping easy deployment to GitHub. I don't think that works easily with $GIT_DIR and $GIT_WORK_DIR.

As for other special directories, maybe all . directories within the destination directory could be kept?

[listx]

FWIW, I use rsync as part of a post-build script, like this:

dest='listx.github.io/'
targ='_site/'
rsync -ahP --no-whole-file --inplace --delete --exclude=.git $targ $dest                                                                                                           
cp -f .gitignore $dest

where listx.github.io is its own git repo.

I think if we do go ahead with keeping the .git folder (or any other special folders) within _site untouched, we should make the user define all such special cases explicitly; i.e., let's not implicitly treat some particular files/paths as special.

[cryptica]

I like the idea of keeping the built files in the same repository, but on a separate branch. By including it as a submodule, there is need to call cp or rsync in a post-build script.

Adding an option to specify which directories to keep within _site would also work and be perfectly acceptable for me.