Re: How thorough must the clean target be?
Bill Allombert <allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr> writes:
> On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 10:44:53AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> In practice, I think that would rule out running Autoconf and Automake
>> at build time except for simple packages, as those programs make fairly
>> widespread changes.
> Well you can do 'make maintainer-clean' in the clean target. This will
> remove any files generated by Autoconf/Automake. Did I missed something ?
> The only unclear issues is files that exist in the tarball but get
> removed in the clean target.
That's the part that seems to still contradict the current policy wording.
Policy says that the clean target has to undo everything that build did.
If build ran Automake, removing all Makefile.in files doesn't seem like
"undoing" that. It seems just as far from undoing as leaving the newly
generated ones in place.
> However since dpkg-buildpackage default to run debian/rules clean prior
> to build the package, one might consider to limit the policy requirement
> to that case:
> 1> dpkg-source -x foo.dsc && cd foo-*
> 2> debian/rules clean
> 3> debian/rules binary
> 4> debian/rules clean
> We would then require that the tree after 4 must be indentical to the
> tree after 2.
Packages that run Autoconf/Automake during build would still fail this,
unless they ran Autoconf/Automake during clean. And doing the latter is
functionally equivalent, with most build tools, to running
Autoconf/Automake at packaging time and including the results in the diff.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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