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From: | Eric Blake |
Subject: | Re: Automake and Texinfo: clean the info or pdf file |
Date: | Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:59:09 -0600 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100806 Fedora/3.1.2-1.fc13 Mnenhy/0.8.3 Thunderbird/3.1.2 |
On 09/03/2010 11:07 AM, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
Why the Makefile is removed when I call the distclean target?Because it is generated by configure
And more particularly, because Makefile is machine-dependent and must NOT be part of a tarball. Remember, 'make distclean' is the process to take you back to the state of the tarball.
So why we choose to keep the *.info files if they are generated files?Because they require a maintainer-only, unportable tool to be generated. And since they do not depend on the architecture or configuration of the system were they will be installed, the best policy is to distribute them in their already-processed form.
Indeed, since *.info files are machine-invariant, it is a courtesy to the user to let them use a pre-built version rather than requiring that they have the same maintainer-only tools for generating them.
The same argument goes for *.c files generated from *.y grammars - the *.c file may be generated, but it is machine-independent, therefore, it makes sense to distribute it pre-built in the tarball so that users need not have flex and bison available.
-- Eric Blake address@hidden +1-801-349-2682 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
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