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Comment by HKH2 | Hacker News Reader

If you put a non-empty placeholder file in that folder, it won't be empty any more, so it shouldn't be removed.

Yea but it doesn't matter. The clean from gradle deletes the folder entirely and creates a new one in it's place. I don't care. Just sync the path. That's all I need. Instead Syncthing literally stop syncing ALL folders because "oh no something went wrong".

For whatever reason open source software always has these weird edge case engineering "solutions" that really aren't that great. If someone was actually a paying customer and asked for this the engineers would just figure something out instead of making excuses for why it is the way it is.

It's easy to open a pull request instead of complaining

Commercial products usually aim to satisfy its paying customer's needs. FOSS is, not always but most times, about satisfying one's own needs. So it won't be that easy to change a developer's mind who is determined about their way of doing things even if it is not the best way for others.

It's also kind of arrogant of FOSS advocates to say "just make a pull request" whenever there's criticism of anything FOSS. You could spend weeks working on something only to have the maintainer say no and I've seen this happen and every time it does I just think to myself "welp there's another person who will never make another pull request again".

As a FOSS maintainer I always try to make it clear that before trying your luck with a PR, you should always first engange in a conversation with me.

Seems kind of obvious to my eyes, asking, talking, discussing about some change before doing the actual work. But as it seems, "obviousness" is in the eye of the beholder...

That's fine and all except that the typical refrain from internet folks is that if something is free then you are not allowed to critique, comment, or request changes. If you really care about freedom you can handle a little bit of online banter.

No one is saying you're not allowed to critique the software. You're critiquing the people who create that software for free

Then fork it? No one is stopping you.

I assume you don't care about missing out on updates since that's the free work you're complaining about

> The clean from gradle deletes the folder entirely and creates a new one in it's place.

Maybe it's possible to .. not do that?

You expect me to not use a basic feature of a compiler?

o_O weird take but k

If a build system produces an adverse outcome, it is often possible to customize it so that it does not delete things which you would rather not have deleted. (I've no idea whether this is specifically easy or not in gradle)

> The clean from gradle deletes the folder entirely and creates a new one in it's place.

That's really bizarre behavior. If the folder has no files or zero byte files then it might make sense, but if gradle's deleting non-empty files that don't concern it, that seems to be more of a problem with gradle.

I get the point though; if there's no versioning, why bother having an empty folder?

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