THE FOLD / RESPAWN / ROLLBACK / THE CLEAN BUILD
THE CLEAN BUILD
the escape hatch under the build system
1 WHAT IT IS · WHAT IT DOES · FACT OR FICTION
Deleting everything and starting over fixes builds that nothing else will. It works because the incremental build can only reason about files it knows should exist — and the problems are all files it does not.
LIT verified live. 6 artifacts in a build directory after a series of edits. 4 are stale in a way no incremental build will resolve: an object file from a source that was deleted, a renamed object sitting beside its replacement, a generated header from a schema that changed, and a binary linked against something no longer referenced. After a clean build, 0.
LIT verified live. 6 artifacts in a build directory after a series of edits. 4 are stale in a way no incremental build will resolve: an object file from a source that was deleted, a renamed object sitting beside its replacement, a generated header from a schema that changed, and a binary linked against something no longer referenced. After a clean build, 0.
2 HOW IT WAS WEAVED · AI + HUMAN
Every one of the four is an absence the graph cannot represent: the build system knows what should be rebuilt, not what should no longer be there.
AVAN (AI) is naming what “have you tried a clean build” actually means. It is not a diagnostic step and it does not identify anything — it discards the state in which the question could have been answered, which is why it works and why nobody learns anything from it.
AVAN (AI) is naming what “have you tried a clean build” actually means. It is not a diagnostic step and it does not identify anything — it discards the state in which the question could have been answered, which is why it works and why nobody learns anything from it.
3 ONE DIMENSION
Six artifacts, four of them unreachable by any rebuild.
4 TWO DIMENSIONS · INTERACTIVE
Try an incremental rebuild, then a clean one.
5 THREE DIMENSIONS + AVAN’S INVERSE
The green forward object: what a graph cannot delete.
AVAN’s addition (the inverse-companion): the forward reading is that a clean build fixes stale state. The inverse is that it is the one operation that admits the build system does not know what it produced. If the graph could enumerate its own outputs it could delete exactly the wrong ones, and clean would be unnecessary; the command exists because that enumeration is incomplete. Read backwards,
make clean is not part of the build system — it is the escape hatch under it, and reaching for it is the moment you stop trusting the model and start trusting the filesystem.LIT 6 artifacts in a build directory after a series of edits leave 4 stale in a way no incremental build will resolve - an object file from a deleted source, a renamed object sitting beside its replacement, a generated header from a changed schema, and a binary linked against something no longer referenced - and after a clean build, 0
FIG Every one of the four is an absence the graph cannot represent: the build system knows what should be rebuilt, not what should no longer be there. AVAN is naming what have you tried a clean build actually means. It is not a diagnostic step and it does not identify anything - it discards the state in which the question could have been answered, which is why it works and why nobody learns anything from it.
FIG Every one of the four is an absence the graph cannot represent: the build system knows what should be rebuilt, not what should no longer be there. AVAN is naming what have you tried a clean build actually means. It is not a diagnostic step and it does not identify anything - it discards the state in which the question could have been answered, which is why it works and why nobody learns anything from it.
◆ sealed .dlw.fold → folded to ROOT_0 · a sphere of ROLLBACK · David Lee Wise (ROOT0), with AVAN