What exactly is meant when mr.developer says "The package 'django-quoteme' is dirty."

Question

I'm using mr.developer to track some packages on github. When I rerun my buildout, I get:

The package 'django-quoteme' is dirty.

Do you want to update it anyway? [yes/No/all] y

What is meant by "dirty" exactly?

Answer 1

From http://github.com/fschulze/mr.developer:

Dirty SVN

You get an error like::

ERROR: Can't switch package 'foo' from 'https://example.com/svn/foo/trunk/', because it's dirty.

If you have not modified the package files under src/foo, then you can check what's going on with status -v. One common cause is a *.egg-info folder which gets generated every time you run buildout and this shows up as an untracked item in svn status.

You should add .egg-info to your global Subversion ignores in ~/.subversion/config, like this:: global-ignores = *.o *.lo *.la *.al .libs *.so .so.[0-9] *.a *.pyc *.pyo *.rej ~ ## .#* .*.swp .DS_Store *.egg-info

So it looks like you should use status -v to see what they mean by "dirty" in your case.

Answer 2

I don't know what it means specifically in this context, but in the computing science world, "dirty" usually means its been modified. Maybe one the files in the package has been edited, and by updating it, you'll lose those changes, hence the warning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_%28computer_science%29