https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=106429
--- Comment #13 from Jonathan Wakely <redi at gcc dot gnu.org> --- (In reply to Martin Vahi from comment #11) > For me the "make clean" is a standard feature that is like the close button > at the corner of a window. For me, the fact that someone does not bother to > use the close button at the corner of the window is not an excuse, why the > button at the corner of the window should not work as expected. The same > with the "make clean": it is nice to do it automatically just to make sure > that I won't waste my human-life-minutes/hours on some triviality that comes > from leaving old build results laying around. So delete the whole build tree. Why would you want to keep an empty directory around after running 'make clean'? > > Actually, with some projects, I do not remember, which, there was a > distinction between "make clean" and "make clear", where the "make clear" > reset the source tree to the state as it is expected to be after fresh > checkout and the "make clean" was allowed to not delete all build system > generated files. The GCC build should be done outside the source tree, and won't change anything in the source tree anyway, so that distinction would be pointless. The source tree is left clean, and the build tree can be removed after building. I agree it shouldn't crash, but it also doesn't need to be used at all. It's there because automake always adds a 'clean' target to makefiles, not because it's useful.
