Re: RFC: ./configure or ./config.status --clean

[Russ Allbery]

Akim Demaille <address@hidden> writes:

> It imposes quite some complications to maintain this possibility, and
> I'm not sure it's good.  In addition, the semantics of distclean in a
> subdirectory being so fuzzy (to my eyes), that making it valid only in
> a top level directory seems reasonable to me.  The problem being the
> last two words, of course :)

maintclean in a subdirectory is useful and fairly well-defined, however.
Think of removing bison-generated parsers.  And usually maintclean depends
on distclean, the way most makefiles that I've seen are written.

> 2. Because `distclean' doesn't make a lot of sense to me in subdir, as
> an additional question, do we still want to enable distclean from a
> subdir, and if so, would it be grave that this subdir distclean triggers
> the top level's distclean.

Running distclean in a subdirectory triggering the parent's distclean
target would indeed be a very grave bug.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>