Hi List! Having three different clean targets in all the .nmake files doesn't make any real sense and provides a permanent cause of trouble and confusion.
The differences in: -clean -maintainer-clean -distclean ... sounds all very much over-engineered to me. To be honest I don't even know what the different target differ on and what they are intended for (and I guess most other Windows developers won't know either). ... and to be honest I don't really want to know. My experience is simple: Everything else than distclean doesn't work under some circumstances and will cause a lot more work than it will save Remember on Windows, someone building from the sources *is* a developer (unlike Unix systems where it could be an educated user as well). If we enforce every developer to provide all required tools, it's pretty simpler to provide a single clean target which simply removes *all* intermediate and target files - so after that you simply build from scratch reliably. So removing a lot of optionality in the Win32 build process and documenting only a single target well is far better than providing a lot of options which doesn't work at all combinations (and will never be tested under all combinations) - and of course will never be documented well - e.g. the maintainer-clean target was *never* documented for the Windows platforms *at all*. We should simply have a single clean target which is doing the job. Everything else is just adding new complexity without gaining a lot more comfort from it. Calling a maintainer-clean target just to know if it doesn't work having to call the distclean target anyway just to make sure, doesn't make a lot of sense (and in the long run won't save any time IMHO). So we should simply: - remove the clean and maintainer-clean targets - rename the distclean target into the "one and only" clean target This will make the clean process a lot more robust and a lot less confusing ... Regards, ULFL _______________________________________________ Wireshark-dev mailing list Wireshark-dev@wireshark.org http://www.wireshark.org/mailman/listinfo/wireshark-dev
