Kernel "make clean" kills repo

[Kevin Smith]

Chad Netzer wrote:
> This could become a problem for other projects that adopt Mercurial, and
> are using GCC to auto-generate dependencies.  Typically, these
> dependency files are generated with the .d suffix, and are often deleted
> as part of the Makefile 'cleaning' process.  Furthermore, the cleaning
> commands will most likely, naively, just delete all .d files, borking
> the Mercurial repository.  .i files also have a similar problem, as they
> may be autogenerated, and thus, auto-deleted.

Given the catastrophic results, it seems worth considering changing from 
.i and .d to some rarer extensions. If the results were merely confusing 
or inconvenient, or if the only problem were with some obscure 
development tools or processes, I would be less concerned.

It really shouldn't be that easy for an SCM to silently lose data.

Kevin