Re: MAINTAINERCLEANFILES for autotools

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Behdad Esfahbod wrote on Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 12:23:16AM CEST:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > One problem is that it is surprisingly difficult
> > to remove all files correctly in all the different setups that autotools
> > support, in such a way that 'make' both finishes cleanly, and doesn't
> > cause any autotools reruns on the way.

> I fully understand how tricky it gets.
> 
> Re maintainer-clean vs bootstrap-clean, the most common understanding I've
> seen (and have personally always assumed is):
> 
>   - clean removes all files generated by make but not by configure
>   - distclean removes all files not in the tarball
>   - maintainer-clean removes all files not in cvs/svn/git, which includes all
> bootstrap-generated files as well as any generated-distributed files.
> 
> Now if you add bootstrap-clean I easily get what I want by a simple:
> 
> maintainer-clean: bootstrap-clean
> 
> Or that can be done by default.

Well, if it cannot be done by default, then chances are that your simple
addition will cause some dependency rebuild issue, too.  But discussing
code that doesn't exist yet is moot, really.

> What I'm saying is, when automake generates Makefile.in from
> Makefile.am, it's clear that that Makefile.in will be processed by
> configure to generate Makefile.  Right?

At least I don't know of useful exceptions; hmm, maybe someone having a
toplevel Makefile.am file only for ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS, and otherwise using
a hand-written GNUmakefile.  Hmm.

> Or is there any useful scenario that doesn't do that?
> Automake should automatically AC_CONFIG_FILES() those Makefile's.  For other
> Makefile.in's, it's up to the user to list them.

One issue here is that automake is not necessarily run before autoconf.
There is not really a way to pass information from automake to autoconf.

Cheers,
Ralf