Re: Automake and Texinfo: clean the info or pdf file

[YuGiOhJCJ Mailing-List]

On Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:05:11 -0400
"Alfred M. Szmidt" <address@hidden> wrote:

> 
>    >    If I call :
>    >    $ make
>    >    The .info file is built.
>    > 
>    >    If I call :
>    >    $ make clean
>    >    The .info file is not cleaned.
>    > 
>    >    It is the same thing for pdf, if I call :
>    >    $ make pdf
>    >    The .pdf file is built.
>    > 
>    >    If I call :
>    >    $ make clean
>    >    The .pdf file is not cleaned.
>    > 
>    >    Is there a rule which clean the .info or .pdf file?
>    > 
>    > That is as intended, documentation is supposed to be distribtued with
>    > the tarball so that users do not need to install whatever tools are
>    > needed to generate it, hence why `make clean' does not remove them.
>    > If you wish to remove all generated files, you'll need to do `make
>    > distclean'.
> 
>    Now, when I call :
>    $ make clean
>    the .pdf file is removed correctly :-)
> 
>    If I call :
>    $ make distclean
>    the .info file isn't removed but the .pdf file and the Makefile are 
> removed.
>    I am suprise to see my Makefile disappears and I must run the configure 
> script in order to build it again.
>    The only way I found to remove my .info file is to call the rm command 
> manually.
> 
> Sorry, I was refering to maintainer-clean.  distclean is supposed to
> make the source directory look as if it was just an extracted tarball,
> and the info files are supposed to be distributed as part of the
> distribution.
> 
>    What target can help me to remove the .info file built with the make 
> command?
>    Why the Makefile is removed when I call the distclean target?
> 
> maintainer-clean will remove it, but what are you trying to achive?
> It is on purpose that the info files are distributed as part of the
> source tree.
> 

In fact, I was only astonished because :
-Makefile is removed with 'make clean' because Makefile is a generated file
-*.info files are not removed with 'make clean' but I can tell *.info files are 
generated files because to produce them, I use my *.texi files and the 
'makeinfo' command

So why we choose to keep the *.info files if they are generated files?