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

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,
  the standards define `maintainer-clean' as a target which is only a
slightly different from distclean.  Besides files cleaned by
distclean, it delets *.c files generated by bison, manual pages
generated by latex2man, etc.

For details, see my post here:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autoconf/2007-03/msg00043.html

But people tend to guess that this target must be the opposite to
bootstrapping from CVS.

I witnessed that such a great names as Bob Proulx and Ralf Wildenhues
interpreted maintainer-clean this way, see the thread cited above.

Moreover, I noticed that AutoGen tries to use maintainer-clean in
this twisted way.

Another example: when I submitted a patch that removed Makefile.in
from MAINTAINERCLEANFILES to HAL, I got told that using
`maintainer-clean' to delete everything generated by autotools has
become a ``common practice'':
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2007-March/007667.html

I'm afraid that this might become a big mess.  I think that the GNU
standardization crew might help here.

There is a strong need for an un-bootstrap.  Which command shouls
fill the gap?

If `make maintainer-clean', then the GNU Standards should be changed
to reflect this.  The obvious disadvantage is that if the
bootstrap&&configure does not finish, maintainer-clean is not usable.

Or we could implement --clean options to autoconf, automake, ...
all the way until we have `autoreconf --clean' and until it is
trivial to implement `bootstrap.sh --clean'.

I'm looking forward to hear your opinions.

Have a nice day,
        Stepan Kasal