Re: distclean doesn't remove nodist BUILT_SOURCES

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,

[this mail won't probably tell anything new to Alexandre, but I write
it for the sake of archive readers]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 10:52:19PM +0200, Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:
> Aside from the CLEANFILE/DISTCLEANFILE debate, I stumbled upon
> one case where nodist_ files were not supposed to be cleaned
> earlier this year.  Only I cannot remember it.  It's
> embarrassing.  I'll assume it was a dream, and put this on
> my TODO list for 1.10.

I had a conversation with Jirka Hanika (geo), who also reminded you about
the dream.  Though his examples are somewhat exotic, he has convinced me
that automake should not automatically remove the files from
nodist_*_SOURCES.

I see 2 main reasons now:

1) Automake should not break weird Makefile.am's, like the ones described
by Jirka.

2) Some of the files files belong to CLEANFILES, other to DISTCLEANFILES.
It's not easy to distinguish them (scanning configure.ac for AC_SUBST),
and automake shouldn't try to do this guess.
Including them all to DISTCLEANFILES lowers the probability that the
author will populate CLEANFILES accordingly.

Both these arguments falls under the overall rule that automake shouldn't
behave like "I know better what you want to do".  (People already
complained against that and this change would cause more complaints.)

So I'm convinced that the current behaviour is OK and should not be changed.

(But the manual should perhaps say that all files from nodist_*_SOURCES
should also go to either CLEANFILES or DISTCLEANFILES.  And there also
might be a short explanation why this cannot be done automake itself.)

Have a nice day,
        Stepan Kasal