Re: Shouldn't the definition of maintainer-clean be changed?

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello everyone,

First, please be aware of another thread discussing a similar topic:
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.gnulib.bugs/9692/focus=9695>

* Benoit Sigoure wrote on Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 12:39:32PM CET:
> 
> Same thing here. Actually I discovered last year, by reading the GNU Coding
> Standards that maintainer-clean wasn't what I thought it was. Many 
> people still get it wrong where I work.

There are a couple of decisions to make for implementation (and also for
eventual standardization, but let's just ignore this aspect for the
moment):

- It was already noted that the current way "maintainer-clean" works,
  is helpful for some people and needed by them.
  So don't destroy this for them.  Thus, use a new name for a new
  semantics.  This also helps other surprises due to backward
  incompatibility.

- If you think the "maintainer-clean" is the best possible name.
  Well, so someone chose less than ideally last time.  This should
  give you the more motivation to choose a good name this time.

> >I was afraid that if we let the rumour spread, this will soon become
> >the de-facto standard for half of the projects, and the name
> >"maintainer-clean" will no longer have any meaning.
> 
> I'm afraid that many people already use this target to un-bootstrap their
> project by extending MAINTERCLEANFILES.

So?  The impact of doing so is mostly limited to the people developing
the package.  Few mere users of a package need the maintainer-clean
functionality very badly.  But if you change Automake, you will impact
all packages, also those that needed otherwise.

> In a first time, I'm trying to implement --clean in
> autoreconf/aclocal/autoconf/autoheader/automake (maybe in autopoint too? 
> I've discovered this tool yesterday when reading the code of
> autoreconf)

Again, please look at the gnulib thread, and avoid doing work twice.
Thanks.

> Then I'm thinking of implementing a target such as "bootclean" that
> would do maintainer-clean + un-bootstrap.

The "bootstrap" name is another thing open to discussion.  FWIW, I don't
care enough, but at least for the autotools packages themselves, the
name makes sense: they do solve some kind of chicken and egg problem.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf