Re: Shouldn't the definition of maintainer-clean be changed?

[Benoit Sigoure]

Quoting Stepan Kasal <address@hidden>:
> In the course of the preceding year or two, whenever I heard about
> mainatiner-clean, it was misinterpreted this way.
> (That's why I reacted so hysterically when I saw your hint on the
> automake list.)

Same thing here. Actually I discovered last year, by reading the GNU Coding
Standards that maintainer-clean wasn't what I thought it was. Many 
people still
get it wrong where I work.

> I cannot agree that the need is "very particular".  Virtually every
> projects' CVS build instructions start with point 1. "get a clean
> checkout".  And if the build does not work, the user wants to get back
> to that clean checkout.

Yes, I've frequently seen this too.

> I was afraid that if we let the rumour spread, this will soon become
> the de-facto standard for half of the projects, and the name
> "maintainer-clean" will no longer have any meaning.

I'm afraid that many people already use this target to un-bootstrap their
project by extending MAINTERCLEANFILES.

> So I wanted to see how do the standard makers feel about it.
>
> > It would be good to have some improved functionality in this area.
> > See also my posting asking for a clean target for generated source
> > files.  [All it needs is someone to actually do the work. :-)]
> >
> >   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2007-03/msg00001.html
>
> OK, so if want to do something about this, I should first implement
> --clean, and then start recommending it as the right tool for the
> purpose.

I started to implement --clean yesterday (from CVS HEAD)... It's the 
very first
time I dig into the code of the autotools but it does not seem to be very hard
to implement. I don't know if I'll succeed but at least I can try ;)

In a first time, I'm trying to implement --clean in
autoreconf/aclocal/autoconf/autoheader/automake (maybe in autopoint too? I've
discovered this tool yesterday when reading the code of autoreconf)

Then I'm thinking of implementing a target such as "bootclean" that would do
maintainer-clean + un-bootstrap.

Any comments?

Cheers,

--
SIGOURE Benoit aka Tsuna
  _____
 /EPITA\ Promo 2008, LRDE