On Thu, 1 Apr 2021 at 18:33, Eli Zaretskii <
eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> From: Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>
> Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2021 14:10:50 +1100
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>
> I wonder if it would be possible for make maintainer-clean to somehow
> look at what is in .gitignore and ensure anything in there is also
> removed? Would be good if at least that target returned the repo to an
> exact replica of what you would get if you did a fresh clone.
First, you should be using extraclean, not maintainer-clean; see the
top-level Makefile.in for the documentation of the various clean
targets.
And second, we should simply make sure extraclean removes all the
generated files, as documented, and keep it that way. Looking into
.gitignore means either building its interpreter into our build system
(a non-trivial job, AFAIU), or using Git itself to do the job, which
would mean the job cannot be done without Git -- a disadvantage, IMO.
In that case, either extraclean should be added to the make help output or if the preferred mechanism is to read Makefile.in, then remove make help.
--