cargo clean --release removes entire target directory without warning

[spearman]

Problem

Running $ cargo clean --release seems to silently remove the entire target directory. I would expect at least a warning that this would happen when passing the '--release' flag since the intention was to only clean the release build.

[mbrubeck]

I'm not sure why clean even has a --release flag, since both with and without the flag, it removes both dev and release artifacts. So even if this bug were fixed, there'd be no way to remove only non-release artifacts.

[lukaslueg]

Having taken a quick look at the tests, it seems cargo clean will always clean everything. cargo clean -p mypkg --release should only remove the release-artifacts.

[dwijnand]

Yep, I can reproduce this too:

21:39:38 $ cargo new foo
     Created binary (application) `foo` project

21:39:42 $ cd $_

21:39:44 $ cargo build
   Compiling foo v0.1.0 (/s/foo)
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 0.80s

21:39:56 $ cargo build --release
   Compiling foo v0.1.0 (/s/foo)
    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 0.35s

21:39:59 $ ls -l target
total 0
drwxr-xr-x@ 12 dnw  staff  384 20 Nov 21:39 debug/
drwxr-xr-x@ 11 dnw  staff  352 20 Nov 21:39 release/

21:40:03 $ cargo clean --release

21:40:11 $ ls -l target
ls: target: No such file or directory

21:40:13 ! cargo -Vv
cargo 1.30.0 (a1a4ad372 2018-11-02)
release: 1.30.0
commit-hash: a1a4ad37271b61209cd55d21f2c83f2773cbe113
commit-date: 2018-11-02

[lukaslueg]

cargo new foo
cd foo
cargo build
cargo build --release
cargo clean -p foo --release

leaves you with a target/debug intact. Maybe the best course of action is to disallow --release if -p is not specified?

[dwijnand]

Maybe the best course of action is to disallow --release if -p is not specified?

Only if fully fixing it isn't possible, sure!