Patch proposal: Add --clean options to unbootstrap a project.

[Benoit Sigoure]

Hello,

this is basically a followup of
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2007-03/msg00036.html

Short reminder: it is a common mistake to expect that maintainer-clean
will revert a working copy to the state it was after a fresh checkout
(before a bootstrap which usually does autoreconf -fvi).  Some people
even change this target by adding Makefile.in and the like in
MAINTAINERCLEANFILES (and thus often wonder why this is not done by
default).  The idea was to implement a rule, say bootstrap-clean, that
would do this.  Unfortunately the autotools don't provide any way to
undo the work of autoreconf -fvi so I implemented this.  Later on, it
will be easy for automake to generate a bootstrap-clean rule that would
Do The Right Thing.

I've reviewed the patches I proposed back in March, completed them with
tests, ChangeLog and NEWS entries.  If they are accepted, I'll write the
documentation.

Comments welcome.

Cheers,

PS: autopoint (formerly gettextize) is not yet supported by this change
(although autoreconf tries to use autopoint --clean) but I'll patch it
sooner or later.

PPS: Although this would belong to
{autoconf,automake,address@hidden, I only sent it to the
Autoconf ML because Autoconf has the biggest patch and I expect Automake
and Libtool maintainers to see this message.  I hope my assumption
wasn't wrong :)

--
Benoit Sigoure aka Tsuna
EPITA Research and Development Laboratory

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autoconf-bootclean.patch
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automake-bootclean.patch
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libtool-bootclean.patch
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