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Document Workload Clean Design
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nagilson authored and JL03-Yue committed May 17, 2023
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# Workload Clean

## Introduction & Background
`dotnet workload clean` is a command that was designed in .NET 8.

Sometimes if uninstalls are interrupted, or other unknown issues occur, workload packs can become orphaned on a developer machine.
Customers have reported many broken states -- some with their manifest files, others because of potential orphaned packs.
These orphaned packs that the SDK did not correctly remove can reside on the file system directly, or in the registry as garbage registry keys.

The point of this command is to help users:
- Clean up residue on their system, saving disk space.
- Help potentially restore their machine into a working state with workloads.

We considered `workload clean` as an option to "clean" or restore manifests to known SDK states, however, because of the existence of `workload repair`, we decided that has poor UX and can be done in that command.

## Command Spec

`dotnet workload clean`:

Runs workload [garbage collection](https://github.com/dotnet/designs/blob/main/accepted/2021/workloads/workload-installation.md#workload-pack-installation-records-and-garbage-collection) for either file-based or MSI-based workloads.
Under this mode, garbage collection behaves as normally, cleaning only the orphaned packs themselves, and not their records. This means it will clean up orphaned packs from uninstalled versions of the .NET SDK, or packs where installation records for the pack no longer exist.
This will only impact packs of feature bands below or at the current feature band number of the SDK running `workload clean`, as the overall workload pack structural design may change in later versions.

Lists all Visual Studio Workloads installed on the machine and warns that they must be uninstalled via Visual Studio instead of the .NET SDK CLI.
This is to provide clarity as to why some workloads are not cleaned/uninstalled after running `dotnet workload clean`.

`dotnet workload clean --all`:

Unlike workload clean, `workload clean --all` runs garbage collection irregularly, meaning that it cleans every existing pack on the machine that is not from VS, and is of the current SDK workload installation type. (Either File-Based or MSI-Based.)

Because of this, it also removes all workload installation records for the running .NET SDK feature band and below. `workload clean` does not yet remove installation records, as the manifests are currently the only way to map a pack to the workload ID, but the manifest files may not exist for orphaned packs.

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