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

[Roger Leigh]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2002 at 07:04:07PM +0200, Akim Demaille wrote:
> 
> | Akim Demaille writes:
> | > What I'm doing now is buying my freedom.  The freedom to extend
> | > Autoconf without 1. requiring from the rest of the world that they
> | > adjust their distclean rules, 2. requiring that Automake folks release
> | > a newer Automake etc., not to mention that it needs 1. writing
> | > documentation, 2. telling the people to read it.
> | 
> | All of these are good goals, but there are at least three other ways to
> | achieve them:
> | 
> | 1. _AC_EXTRA_CLEAN_FILES([configure.lineno autom4te.cache])
> | 
> |    To be traced by automake.
> 
> So you are throwing away the non Automake users, and you lose the
> ability to run ./configure --clean without Makefile (precisely after a
> distclean).

Why can't you do this:

%% AC_CONFIG_DISTCLEANFILES(FILES)
%% Clean FILES
AC_DEFUN([AC_CONFIG_DISTCLEANFILES],
[ac_distcleanfiles="$ac_distcleanfiles $1"
AC_SUBST(ac_distcleanfiles)
])

You need to add support to automake to add ac_distcleanfiles to the
distclean target, but after that any macro can register files to be
cleaned.  You can also do the cleaning (optionally) in config.status,
and in your own Makefile.ins--you won't be tied to automake.

An additional macro for ac_maintainercleanfiles would be nice.  A
similar method could be used to tell automake what files to distribute,
such as configure, configure.ac, config.h.in etc. that automake
currently hard-codes.

-- 
Roger Leigh
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