Hello everyone, First, please be aware of another thread discussing a similar topic: <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.gnulib.bugs/9692/focus=9695>
* Benoit Sigoure wrote on Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 12:39:32PM CET: > > Same thing here. Actually I discovered last year, by reading the GNU Coding > Standards that maintainer-clean wasn't what I thought it was. Many > people still get it wrong where I work. There are a couple of decisions to make for implementation (and also for eventual standardization, but let's just ignore this aspect for the moment): - It was already noted that the current way "maintainer-clean" works, is helpful for some people and needed by them. So don't destroy this for them. Thus, use a new name for a new semantics. This also helps other surprises due to backward incompatibility. - If you think the "maintainer-clean" is the best possible name. Well, so someone chose less than ideally last time. This should give you the more motivation to choose a good name this time. > >I was afraid that if we let the rumour spread, this will soon become > >the de-facto standard for half of the projects, and the name > >"maintainer-clean" will no longer have any meaning. > > I'm afraid that many people already use this target to un-bootstrap their > project by extending MAINTERCLEANFILES. So? The impact of doing so is mostly limited to the people developing the package. Few mere users of a package need the maintainer-clean functionality very badly. But if you change Automake, you will impact all packages, also those that needed otherwise. > In a first time, I'm trying to implement --clean in > autoreconf/aclocal/autoconf/autoheader/automake (maybe in autopoint too? > I've discovered this tool yesterday when reading the code of > autoreconf) Again, please look at the gnulib thread, and avoid doing work twice. Thanks. > Then I'm thinking of implementing a target such as "bootclean" that > would do maintainer-clean + un-bootstrap. The "bootstrap" name is another thing open to discussion. FWIW, I don't care enough, but at least for the autotools packages themselves, the name makes sense: they do solve some kind of chicken and egg problem. Hope that helps. Cheers, Ralf
