> To be honest I don't really understand the point of the ignore_errors flag on rmtree. If rmtree fails to delete the directory tree (which will happen if one of the files can't be deleted), why would you want it to return succesfully?

I presume it’s meant as a best-effort cleanup.

Regardless both Eric & Serhiy are right: it’s a programmer error to call it on files and it may shadow bugs catching it. OTOH the implementation is inconsistent and not backward compatible now, so we have to fix it unfortunately.

The patch needs to address Giampaolo’s (bug tracker) & Serhiy’s (Rietveld) comments before it can be merged though – thanks. :)