"The clean action has not yet been ported"

[JohannesMP]

$ premake5 clean
Running action 'clean'...
** The clean action has not yet been ported

---

• Premake 5.0.0.alpha5
• macosx 10.10.5

[dmail00]

I find it strange that ten years later and in a beta stage, there is still the same issue. Does nobody use clean anymore or should I use premake4? What is the blocker with this feature, I would be interested to know and maybe implement it. @starkos

Premake 5.0.0-beta7
Windows 10

[nickclark2016]

I don't believe there are any blockers on the issue. It's just been a lower priority feature to port for us. We'd happily accept any PRs that want to port the feature. The tricky part for implementing "clean" would be needing to go through all of the possible actions, determining their output configuration files, then only removing those.

As for if people use it, I know I do not. I've never really come across a need for it.

[Jarod42]

I have investigated on the task, and there is API problem for me:

• location might be given as location 'solution/' + _ACTION which cannot be correctly retrieved (_ACTION would be "clean" for clean action and not "vs2022" or "gmake". location 'solution/%{_ACTION} might mitigate above the issue, but I don't succeed to have proper location neither (I think baking happens too early) but should be doable.

Having _OPTIONS for clean-up seems better IMO: premake vs2022 --remove-solution.

[JohannesMP]

This may be too philosophical, but if it doesn't do anything, and it's not used, and it's too much work to update it given priority of other tasks... Just kill it. Remove it from the API. I think 10 years is a sufficient threshold to support that choice.

If the originally intended behavior is ever needed, add it as a new feature then. If the old code is needed at that point, that is what we use version control for.

As it stands this just reads as a forever #todo comment that is visible to the end user.