Our components use "foreign" and "dist-bzip2" options. We distribute the tarballs. When running distclean, the tarballs are not removed from the build tree. This is not a problem for us. I was wondering if this is a conscious design decision or an omission.
The reason for asking is the behaviour of distcleancheck. When I build (using a VPATH build), the tarballs are not removed and it issues an error about files being left in the distdir. If it was a design decision, then there should be no errors. If it was an omission, then it should be fixed. The behaviour of distcheck tends to confirm it is an omission. The distcheck target creates a VPATH build and the tarballs. It calls distcleancheck to prove that the directory is now empty. It knows that distcleancheck will not remove the tarballs because it removes them just before making the call: && rm -rf $(DIST_ARCHIVES) \ && $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) distcleancheck Now distcheck claims that the distribution cleaning was completed successfully, but this is not true. The tarballs were left behind but distcheck removed them itself. You get different results whether you use distcheck to verify the distribution or dist followed by distcleancheck. Adding DISTCLEANFILES = the tarballs works ok. automake (GNU automake) 1.10.2 autoconf (GNU Autoconf) 2.63 Regards, Gaetan