cabal-clean : Remove superseded artefacts of cabal v2-build
Removes compilation artefacts in dist-newstyle/build
from older
versions of the package or superseded minor versions of GHC.
For the impatient
Installation
cabal install cabal-clean
Run
cd $MY_PROJECT
cabal-clean
This lists the build artifacts under dist-newstyle/build
.
--- 191M dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-osx/ghc-7.10.3/$MY_PROJECT-2.9.2
--- 72M dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-osx/ghc-8.10.4/$MY_PROJECT-2.9.2
--- 162M dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-osx/ghc-9.0.1/$MY_PROJECT-2.9.2
+++ 135M dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-osx/ghc-7.10.3/$MY_PROJECT-2.9.3
--- 70M dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-osx/ghc-8.10.4/$MY_PROJECT-2.9.3
+++ 145M dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-osx/ghc-8.10.7/$MY_PROJECT-2.9.3
--- 159M dist-newstyle/build/x86_64-osx/ghc-9.0.1/$MY_PROJECT-2.9.3
The superseded ones (assuming ghc-9.0.1
is not on the PATH
),
printed in red and prefixed by dashes (---
),
can then be removed by:
cabal-clean --delete
Rationale
v2-cabal
(the nix-based cabal
) maintains a directory structure for
local builds of the form
dist-newstyle/build/$ARCH/$HC/$PACKAGE-$VERSION
(plus other stuff
that does not take up much disk space). During active development
with several $HC
versions and $VERSION
bumps for the $PACKAGE
,
lots of out-dated build artefacts accumulate over time.
A simple way to clean up is removing the whole dist-newstyle
folder,
but one might want to keep the build artefacts of the most recent
package $VERSION
s of the most recent versions of the Haskell
compiler ($HC
).
Philosophy
-
Go for saving the most disk space with the simplest approach, rather
than a complete clean-up. E.g., don’t care about outdated contents
in dist-newstyle/package-db
as they take little space.
-
Keep only the most recent $VERSION
of the package.
-
Keep only the most recent major versions of $HC
.
-
Keep only versions build with a $HC
which is still on the PATH
(since version 0.2).
-
Assume a monopoly of GHC, ignoring other Haskell compilers, so only
treat $HC
s of the form ghc-$GHCVER
.
-
Work autonomously, ignoring cabal
files.
This saves us parsing various home-grown cabal
file formats.
The latter could be easy using the Cabal
package,
but this package is not very stable,
and we shy the maintenance effort of depending on Cabal
.
-
Dry-run is the default, giving the user opportunity to review the clean-up plan.
Functionality
-
Read the contents of dist-newstyle/build
,
organizing them into a tree according to the pattern
$ARCH/ghc-$GHCVER/$PACKAGE-$VERSION
.
-
Display the outdated versions.
Try to get the disk usage with du -h
and display it.
(I could not find a Haskell library that gets the disk usage OS-agnostically.)
-
With option --delete
actually remove the respective folders.
Examples
List build artifacts of current project,
marking superseded ones that can be deleted:
cabal-clean
Actually delete superseded builds:
cabal-clean --delete
Delete superseded builds without changing to directory:
cabal-clean --delete path/to/my/project/dist-newstyle
Delete superseded builds in many projects:
find . -name "dist-newstyle" -exec cabal-clean --delete {} \;
Get help:
cabal-clean --help
Related
cabal v2-clean
(as of 2021-08-16)
- Removes all build artefacts.
- Does not have a
--dry-run
preview.