Re: Cleaning/restoring autoconf generated files

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org>]

On Tue, 05 Sep 2006, Kapil Hari Paranjape wrote:
> On Tue, 05 Sep 2006, Matej Vela wrote:
> > 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).
> > >
> >         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).
> 
> I wonder ... policy says that clean must---*undo* the changes made by
> 'build' and 'binary'---(my emphasis).

Well, autotools-dev-like packages fix everything up in the *clean* target,
not the build or binary target.

So it doesn't contradict the words of policy, and given that upstream
pristine trees (in their pristine state) are often quite useless for Debian
and THAT is a lot of the reason why there is a clean target and
dpkg-buildpackage calls it *first*, I'd say it doesn't contradict the policy
in spirit either.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh