Re: as upstream - Makes sense to run 'make clean' when running 'make all'?

[Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de>]

On 01/04/2017 07:20 PM, Patrick Schleizer wrote:
> as upstream, does it make sense to run 'make clean' when running 'make all'?

Typically it doesn't because it breaks incremental builds, which makes
development uglier. (You have to rebuild everything everytime you call
'make'.)

For the purpose of Debian packages it doesn't matter though, as long
as you call clean _before_ building the rest.

> Would that be considered good or bad? Any convention on that?

The typical Makefile convention is:

 - Build stuff via:

     make all

   or simply

     make

   Should be idempotent, so multiple calls after another should
   work.

 - Clean the build directory:

     make clean

   Should also be idempotent, calling this in an already cleaned
   tree should change nothing.

 - Install the software:

     make install

 - Install the software but underneath a specific tree

     make install DESTDIR=/tmp/build/install

Now technically calling make clean at the beginning of the build
step doesn't have to break idempotence if you do it right - but I
would still recommend against it because it makes developing the
software much more painful. Doesn't really matter for Debian
though, because Debian builds the entire package from scratch
anyway.

Regards,
Christian