Re: Cleaning/restoring autoconf generated files

[Matej Vela <vela@debian.org>]

Kapil Hari Paranjape <kapil@imsc.res.in> writes:

> I was wondering whether Debian policy regarding the 'clean' target
> is to be interpreted as applying to the autotools generated files as
> well. (As currently stated it would appear to be so).
>
> If so then the following alternate approaches would appear to be
> possible:
>
> 	1. Use the separate tar.gz approach a la DBS.
>
> 	2. Save all autotools generated files before the build
> 	   and restore them after. 

There's also

        3. Remove generated files in 'clean', which will cause
           dpkg-source to ignore them (although with warnings).  This
           is a popular approach for config.guess/config.sub at least
           (e.g. /usr/share/doc/autotools-dev/examples/rules.gz).

Cheers,

Matej