publish ignores dirty files that release does not

[asomers]

I always create a target symlink in each workspace, to store Cargo's generated files on a different file system. But cargo release warns about it, like this:

[2021-09-29T03:21:18Z DEBUG cargo_release::git] Dirty because of:
    target
[2021-09-29T03:21:18Z ERROR cargo_release] Uncommitted changes detected for nix, please commit before release.

That forces me to delete the symlink before running cargo release, which then causes cargo publish to recreate the target directory, but this time as a regular directory instead of a symlink.

Would it be possible to make cargo-release ignore target when doing its git dirty check?

[epage]

Does cargo publish complain about the symlink?

Whats your .gitignore look like?

btw have you considered setting CARGO_TARGET_DIR?
https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/environment-variables.html

[asomers]

CARGO_TARGET_DIR is close, but not good enough, because it needs to be set individually for each workspace. The proposed CARGO_TARGET_DIR_PREFIX variable would solve the problem completely.
rust-lang/cargo#5544
cargo publish --dry-run does not complain about target. The .gitignore file contains target/. But now that you mention it, the trailing slash might be confusing git. If I remove that, then git status shuts up about target. Would that stop cargo-release's warning?

[epage]

Yes, that should quiet cargo-release.

There is still an issue with cargo publish and cargo-release identifying dirty files in different ways.

[epage]

There is still an issue with cargo publish and cargo-release identifying dirty files in different ways.

Just remembered that we have to be more generous than cargo publish because we we modify files not checked by cargo publish (lock file, dependent Cargo.toml, anything touched by replacements or hooks).

In fact, we need to be more generous than we currently are, so created #391