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
