Re: "make distclean" doesn't remove Gnulib header(s)

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, May 13, 2021 at 10:14:11AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I needed to rebuild Texinfo-6.7 after the OS upgrade, so I did "make
> distclean" in the top-level directory.  For some reason, this didn't
> remove gnulib/lib/locale.h, which was produced by the last build on
> the old OS, and that stale locale.h failed the new build, although I
> did run the configure script after "make distclean".
> 
> I'm not sure I understand whether this is a Gnulib bug or a Texinfo
> bug.  Please advise whether to report this to the Gnulib folks.
> 
> Thanks.

Apologies for the delayed response.  I believe it would be a Gnulib bug
as these generated files in Gnulib have never needed to be manually
added to Texinfo's Makefile.am files or similar.  (The only thing
that needs to be done is to ignore these files in git.)

I tried running make distclean myself and the file was removed, so
I don't know why it wasn't removed for you.

When I ran configure again I found that in gnulib/lib/Makefile, there
was the line

am__append_8 = locale.h


and also

BUILT_SOURCES = $(ALLOCA_H) $(ARGZ_H) $(ERRNO_H) fcntl.h $(FLOAT_H) \
        $(GETOPT_H) $(GETOPT_CDEFS_H) inttypes.h $(am__append_5) \
        $(LIMITS_H) $(am__append_8) $(STDARG_H) $(STDBOOL_H) \
        $(STDDEF_H) $(STDINT_H) stdio.h stdlib.h string.h strings.h \
        $(am__append_14) sys/types.h $(am__append_18) unistd.h \
        $(LIBUNISTRING_UNITYPES_H) $(LIBUNISTRING_UNIWIDTH_H) wchar.h \
        wctype.h

which I assume takes care of removing that file on make distclean.  Maybe
you had stale Makefiles for some reason.