I've got some "what the heck?" questions regarding the asset pipeline... (like why does it blow the entire assets dir away?)

Hi -

I've got a couple of questions about the asset pipeline that I'm not seeing answered in the guides or blogs...

First... "rake assets:clean" simply blows away public/assets in it's entirety. I suppose this is okay as long as you never ever ever put anything else in there, but in my trial case I have paperclip also dumping it's files into public/assets. True this is a hold over from an earlier version, but I'll admit I was surprised when assets:clean wiped out files that aren't part of any asset pipeline. It seems like this is a bug and that assets:clean should check the manifest.yml file and only remove files listed there, but maybe I'm missing something. Maybe there should just be a gigantic warning in the docs saying "don't put files into assets".

Would love to get some feedback on what other people think about this?

Second... naming conflicts. Given app/assets/foo/rails.png and app/assets/bar/rails.png then public/assets/rails.png will always be the one from 'foo'. This irks me for some reason. The above is contrived, but I could see tossing some jQuery plugin code in there (some lightbox one for example) and out of pure bad luck ending up with a conflict.

So... should I simply never do this? Or if I do, should I also go through and tweak the urls that jquery plugin is going to use? Or?

Appreciate any insights people have gleaned who've been using 3.1 longer than I have. I probably just need to shift my thinking, but at first glance I'm unsettled.

Thanks!

-philip