best practice advice, use of a custom local-clean target

[Noah Slater]

Hello,

I have two targets, local-clean and distsign, here:

  http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/couchdb/trunk/Makefile.am

I have a couple of questions:

 * Why do I need to create my own target to clean up the Makefile.in files and
   other sundry left overs? Should Automake not ideally clean this up for me?

 * Should I be using $(top_srcdir) in those rules or is it safe to assume that
   the target is being run from the top source directory?

I realise there may not be "correct" answers to these, but was mainly look for
some idea of best practice.

Thanks,

-- 
Noah Slater, http://bytesexual.org/nslater