Re: Built-in target to delete all generated files

[Peter Johansson]

Hi Trevor,

Trevor Harmon wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My project lives in a source code repository (Subversion), and I'm trying to 
> keep all generated files out of it. This would be easier if there were a 
> built-in way of deleting anything and everything generated by Autotools. I 
> could then run autoreconf to recreate them as needed.
>
> I know about "make maintainer-clean", which does most of the job, but it still 
> leaves some generated files around: aclocal.m4, config.h.in, configure, depcomp, INSTALL, 
> install-sh, Makefile.in, and missing.
>
> Is there another makefile target (or any other built-in mechanism) that will 
> delete ALL generated files?
>
>   
You can extend maintainer-clean using either MANTAINERCLEANFILES or 
maintainer-clean-local as documented here

http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#Clean

In that way you need to list all files you wanna have deleted. Another 
way, a more dangerous way I would say, is to use the script `svn-clean' 
which is provided by subversion. You can find it via subversion's 
homepage or download it from here

http://dev.thep.lu.se/yat/svn/tags/0.5/build_support/svn-clean

I used to add a rule for `svn-clean' with something like this:

svn-clean: maintainer-clean
$(PERL) $(top_srcdir)/build-aux/svn-clean $(srcdir)

'make svn-clean' would delete whatever maintainer-clean remioves 
followed by removing all files that are not committed to svn. I learnt 
that this is very dangerous and after a couple of accidents I decided to 
remove the target.

Of note, GCS states that: "More generally, ‘make maintainer-clean’ 
should not delete anything that needs to exist in order to run configure 
and then begin to build the program".


Cheers,
Peter


--
Peter Johansson

svndigest maintainer, http://dev.thep.lu.se/svndigest
yat maintainer,       http://dev.thep.lu.se/yat