For reference, this discussion started when Jos was looking for a MakeMaker target which deletes everything not in the MANIFEST. Naturally he tried "distclean" expecting that to DWIM only to find out it doesn't. It does a realclean and distcheck just telling you what's wrong.
Initially I agreed with him, and was horrified to find MB had parroted MakeMaker's behavior. However... On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 09:26:20AM -0700, Michael G Schwern wrote: > > However, it seems to be actually only *telling* me what is wrong, > > without actually removing the wrong files: > > Reading the documentation, that seems to be the intention as well :( > > Alas. ARGH! Module::Build parroted MakeMaker's behavior! I take that back. Having distclean deleting files would be a Very Bad Thing. Consider the case where you've just added a few new source files to the dist but haven't added it to the manifest. You (or perhaps some build tool) runs "make distclean" and poof! new files gone. One could have distclean move the files to some unclean/ directory instead of deleting them, or confirm before deleting, but really the point of distclean is to make sure that "realclean" does in fact clean out the distribution back to a pristine state. To that end, maybe "distclean" is misnamed.
