Re: How thorough must the clean target be?

[Bill Allombert <allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr>]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 10:44:53AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> However, the current debian-policy statement about clean is:
> 
>     This must undo any effects that the build and binary targets may have
>     had, except that it should leave alone any output files created in the
>     parent directory by a run of a binary target.
> 
> Taken exactly literally, this says that packages that run Autoconf or
> Automake at build time must be able to reverse all changes that those
> tools make when the clean target is run.  Similarly, packages that copy
> new config.sub or config.guess files at build time must save the old
> versions and restore them when the clean target is run.

\usepackage[shameless]{plug}
\begin{plug}
I have proposed a (IMVHO) better solution to the
config.sub/config.guess problem see
<http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2006/03/msg00038.html>
\end{plug}

> 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. 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.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.