Re: A target that's even more bootstrap?

[Phillip Lord]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: address@hidden (Phillip Lord)
>> Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2019 13:53:02 +0100
>> Cc: address@hidden
>> 
>> mostlyclean
>> clean
>> distclean
>> maintainer-clean
>> extraclean
>> bootstrap-clean
>> 
>> The the irregular hyphenation is a bit odd.
>
> clean, distclean, mostlyclean, and maintainer-clean are from the GNU
> Coding Standards (GCS).  Many projects have extraclean.  So this is
> tradition of sorts.
>
>> But, in addition, I would guess that many of these levels
>> (maintainer-clean, extraclean and bootstrap-clean) are really only
>> there to save time; with parallel builds and faster machines I
>> wonder how many of these are actually needed.
>
> AFAIK, the issue at hand is not the speed, the issue is to know what
> generated files get deleted.  Some builds require a specific target
> from this list to be run before the build.  For example, if you weant
> to reconfigure from scratch, you want distclean.
>
>> If I understand it, distclean is most severe. So, why not ditch
>> everything other than distclean and clean?
>
> Because the GCS says otherwise?

The GCS differentiate between "clean" and "mostlyclean" with "may". So,
mostlyclean and clean could be the same. The only difference that is
needed between "distclean" and "maintainer-clean" is that former needs
to delete configure while the latter doesn't (AFAICT, doesn't need
anything else to generate configure). extraclean isn't required and but
could be the same as maintainer-clean. And bootstrap-clean is also not
required -- it could be maintainer-clean. So, it could be made simpler.

But, alas, the inconsistent hyphenation is part of the GCS, so guess we
are stuffed there.

Phil