Re: Best practice for cleaning autotools-generated files?

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Marcin Owsiany writes ("Best practice for cleaning autotools-generated files?"):
> The current best practice for dealing with packages using GNU autotools
> (as described in /usr/share/doc/autotools-dev/README.Debian.gz) is to
> run autoreconf in a prerequisite of a build target, and to remove its
> results in the clean target.

I think this is bad advice.  These files should be shipped in the
source package.  

Doing that makes it much easier to build the package in unexpected
environments (eg, backports, downstream distros).

Ian.