Filesystem 

While the Intelligent Cache provides substantial performance gains it may be undermined by some filesystem assumptions.

Removal 

Removing files is generally antithetical to CI and especially to incremental builds. Generating the files takes time and so too removing them. Since CI is a controlled environment, generating undesired files should be avoided whenever possible.

Ignore 

When generating undesired files is unavoidable, ignoring them is the next best option. Many tools have mechanism for ignoring, for example: .dockerignore or tar --exclude.

Incremental 

Besides taking time to remove the files, doing so can cause problems for incremental jobs.

Imagine an incremental job that executes a set of development tools before removing them to create an artifact. During a subsequent run, the development tools will not be present to execute.

Instead of removing the development tools, one of the following would perform better.

• filter out the tools while creating the artifact
• create the artifact in a subsequent job that is not incremental