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

[Russ Allbery]

Akim Demaille <address@hidden> writes:

> Russ, you are member of this list, and as such, your opinion is not
> that of a regular naive user.  Sure you can answer to me that you need
> to be an expert to use Autoconf, but then, I'm precisely trying to
> kill this.

There are a lot of things that are particularly difficult to figure out in
order to use Autoconf, like how to write macros properly.  Figuring out
how to remove the files that it leaves behind really isn't one of them.
There are very few things simpler than writing make distclean rules or
fixing them if you realize you didn't remove something you should have.
And the failure mode is really not particularly interesting; all that
happens is that there are some files left behind that you don't need.
It's not like those files cause any problems (or if they do, that's a
separate bug that should probably be fixed).

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