gleam new . should not panic if there's already a README.md in the dir

[raquentin]

I think it's a pretty common workflow to create a repo on github w/ readme and perhaps license and then actually initialize the project locally.

While I do think that this should just skip over files like README.md and gitignore by default, there should at least be a more generic --skip <FILENAME> option so you can actually run gleam new without deleting the readme and then deleting the stuff in the generic Gleam one just to replace it with what was there to begin with.

Thoughts?

[lpil]

Let's not skip by default as we don't want to lose data by accident. --skip README.md is longer than rm README.md and the programmer is less likely to know that it needs to be done. What other options are there?

[raquentin]

I agree about not losing data, I'm talking about the case where a user intentionally has their own README.md and they run gleam new ., which panics. So they must mv README.md README.md.tmp just to run gleam new . then rm -rf README.md then mv README.md.tmp README.md, and same with gitignore. Obviously it's not super bothersome, but perhaps could be a bit more ergonomic to have some sort of message in the panic referencing a command --skip or similar which does not try to overwrite existing README or gitignore nor panic at their existence.

I'd say the options are:

• Write Gleam's readme and gitignore to gleam.readme.md and gleam.gitignore.md in the case that a dir already has a readme or gitignore
• Keep it as is
• Add --skip option to initialize gleam project without panicking at existing readme
• Some more that involve command line menus, likely unfavorable

Looking back I think the gleam. prefix option is my favorite as it avoids panic while still allowing the user to choose whether their initial README.md was there intentionally or not.

[han-tyumi]

What I've commonly seen with these types of commands is that by default it will never overwrite any existing files.
But a flag, such as --force & -f, will allow overwriting similar to rm -f.

I also like when the command appends to a file like gitignore if it already exists.

In general I think not doing anything destructive by default is a good idea.