Re: A target that's even more bootstrap?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Phillip Lord)
> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2019 13:53:02 +0100
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> mostlyclean
> clean
> distclean
> maintainer-clean
> extraclean
> bootstrap-clean
> 
> The the irregular hyphenation is a bit odd.

clean, distclean, mostlyclean, and maintainer-clean are from the GNU
Coding Standards (GCS).  Many projects have extraclean.  So this is
tradition of sorts.

> But, in addition, I would guess that many of these levels
> (maintainer-clean, extraclean and bootstrap-clean) are really only
> there to save time; with parallel builds and faster machines I
> wonder how many of these are actually needed.

AFAIK, the issue at hand is not the speed, the issue is to know what
generated files get deleted.  Some builds require a specific target
from this list to be run before the build.  For example, if you weant
to reconfigure from scratch, you want distclean.

> If I understand it, distclean is most severe. So, why not ditch
> everything other than distclean and clean?

Because the GCS says otherwise?