Quoting Stepan Kasal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
In the course of the preceding year or two, whenever I heard about
mainatiner-clean, it was misinterpreted this way.
(That's why I reacted so hysterically when I saw your hint on the
automake list.)
Same thing here. Actually I discovered last year, by reading the GNU Coding
Standards that maintainer-clean wasn't what I thought it was. Many
people still
get it wrong where I work.
I cannot agree that the need is "very particular". Virtually every
projects' CVS build instructions start with point 1. "get a clean
checkout". And if the build does not work, the user wants to get back
to that clean checkout.
Yes, I've frequently seen this too.
I was afraid that if we let the rumour spread, this will soon become
the de-facto standard for half of the projects, and the name
"maintainer-clean" will no longer have any meaning.
I'm afraid that many people already use this target to un-bootstrap their
project by extending MAINTERCLEANFILES.
So I wanted to see how do the standard makers feel about it.
It would be good to have some improved functionality in this area.
See also my posting asking for a clean target for generated source
files. [All it needs is someone to actually do the work. :-)]
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2007-03/msg00001.html
OK, so if want to do something about this, I should first implement
--clean, and then start recommending it as the right tool for the
purpose.
I started to implement --clean yesterday (from CVS HEAD)... It's the
very first
time I dig into the code of the autotools but it does not seem to be very hard
to implement. I don't know if I'll succeed but at least I can try ;)
In a first time, I'm trying to implement --clean in
autoreconf/aclocal/autoconf/autoheader/automake (maybe in autopoint too? I've
discovered this tool yesterday when reading the code of autoreconf)
Then I'm thinking of implementing a target such as "bootclean" that would do
maintainer-clean + un-bootstrap.
Any comments?
Cheers,
--
SIGOURE Benoit aka Tsuna
_____
/EPITA\ Promo 2008, LRDE