Re: Built-in target to delete all generated files

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Trevor,

* Trevor Harmon wrote on Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 09:18:37AM CEST:
> 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?

Not ATM.  Benoit Sigoure has done some work to add such functionality to
autotools, but it was not finished.  I can dig out a link to the patch
proposals.  If somebody is interested in finishing those patches, that
would be very welcome.

Reliably removing all installed/generated files in all possible
situations is fairly tricky because there are several cases where files
may be generated or hand-written, and because one may only remove the
makefile and its dependencies and included files as very last measure
done in some directory before leaving that.

As a workaround you should be able to tell your version control system
which file names/globs it should ignore.  Typically, version control
also allows you to easily list files which are not under ist control,
you could remove them from such a list with a short script.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf