I'm not sure if I would expect spack clean foo to delete the downloaded archive. Does spack clean delete the downloaded archive for everything? If not, we should keep them in line. I think this would be a good setup:

$ spack clean --stage foo  # delete stage for foo
$ spack clean foo  # same as above
$ spack clean --downloads foo  # delete downloaded archive for foo
$ spack clean --stage --downloads foo  # both of the above

It would actually be really nice if spack clean --downloads foo worked. It makes it a lot easier to test fetching for packages I've already downloaded. I've been manually deleting archives for so long.

There's also a reference above that should be updated.

When called with --stage or without arguments this removes all staged files and will be equivalent to running spack clean for every package you have fetched or staged.

This is no longer equivalent to spack clean, it is spack clean.

The functionality didn't change at all. The command:

$ spack clean --stage foo

in this branch is equivalent to:

$ spack clean foo
$ spack purge --stage

in develop (so it deletes the stage for foo, and then it deletes all stages.). Same for other commands. This is reflected in the command help (hopefully):

$ spack help clean
usage: spack clean [-h] [-s] [-d] [-m] [-a] ...

remove temporary build files and/or downloaded archives

positional arguments:
  specs             removes the build stages and tarballs for specs

optional arguments:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit
  -s, --stage       remove all temporary build stages (default)
  -d, --downloads   remove cached downloads
  -m, --misc-cache  remove long-lived caches, like the virtual package index
  -a, --all         equivalent to -sdm

Good catch for the docs. I'll update the reference.

I'm not sure if that's true:

$ spack clean zlib
$ spack fetch zlib
==> Using cached archive: /Users/Adam/spack/var/spack/cache/zlib/zlib-1.2.11.tar.gz

spack clean foo doesn't delete the archived tarball. Or are we talking about different tarballs? Maybe you're talking about the one copied to the stage? I was talking about the one in the downloads mirror.

Anyway, I would like to see this behavior:

$ spack clean --stage foo  # delete stage for foo
$ spack clean foo  # same as above
$ spack clean --downloads foo  # delete downloaded archive for foo
$ spack clean --stage --downloads foo  # both of the above

As long as I can do this, I'm happy. Not sure how much work would be involved in spack clean --downloads foo though.

Can we keep this extension for another PR? The code here behaves exactly like the code in develop, it just merges the two commands. Example:

$ spack clean --stage zlib
==> Cleaning build stage [[email protected]%[email protected]+pic+shared arch=linux-ubuntu14-x86_64 /pgxsxv7]
==> Removing all temporary build stages

$ spack clean --all
==> Removing all temporary build stages
==> Removing cached downloads
==> Removing cached information on repositories

I'll open an issue after this is merged.

Just to clarify, does spack clean foo delete the stage and the cached download archive? Or just the former?

If think what was meant is any downloaded archive in the stage. I didn't check, but maybe this documentation precedes the introduction of the cached download archive. Any suggestion for writing this part better is welcome.

I would just remove the second half of the sentence. We've already explained what spack clean/spack clean --staged does. Here we are clarifying that spack clean foo only applies to foo, not to every package.