Clarifying behavior of unset - gun

Question

I wanted to clarify my understanding of unset() or rather the behavior I am observing. I understand if I call unset() it replaces the value with a null (per the deleting data in Gun). So this is what I would like to confirm, assuming you've called unset():
1) When you call once() or on() it returns null for nodes which have been unset()
2) When you call Gun.obj.empty(table, '_') it returns false
I also tried setting the value of my set to null e.g.
get('mylist').put(null)
Which worked! I wanted to empty my set. However, the next time I added a new node my original set along with all of the original nodes were restored. I ended up writing the following to empty my set
this.context.once().map().once(data => {
let key = data["_"]["#"];
let node = this.context.get(key);
if (node) {
this.context.unset(node);
}
});

Answer 1

I believe that .unset tombstones (null) an item in the table, but not the table itself. Just so others are aware: .unset is community maintained inside of the GUN repo, and not maintained by me - so I may be wrong about its behavior OR the extension may be out of date.
Gun.obj.empty({}) is just a utility to check if an object is empty or not. The 2nd parameter lets you pass it a property to ignore (like '_' which every GUN node has on it in the JS implementation).
You are correct though, that gun.get('list').put(null) should "clear out" the list, such that when you go to save data to it again (or call .set(item) to add an item) this should force/cause GUN to generate a new list/table/set/collection.
It is wrong behavior for it to "resurrect" the old list (unless another peer was trying to at the same time re-write to the old list at the same parent context), so this should be considered a bug that needs to be fixed. (Probably due to the old list ID being cached and not cleared from memory properly)