I notice that some packages (including one I have recently become the maintainer of) have in rules clean a command '-$(MAKE) -i clean' to invoke upstream's cleanup, then later dh_clean Makefile. This is fine, except packages that use things like imake to generate the upstream Makefile in the first place then generate a warning message stating that the makefile was not found if rules clean is invoked twice without a build in between. Packages like hello-debhelper which use autoconf have the same sort of trouble except in this case the -$(MAKE) distclean causes the problems for its own future invocations by removing the Makefile itself. Packages which do a lot of cleaning before building generate this sort of error any time they are built after a manual clean.
I guess this is acceptable behavior since hello does it but I don't like it. Is there any clean way to prevent this without explicitly testing for the existence of the Makefile in question (awkward)? Britton
