Re: too-aggressive clean rule

[John Darrington]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 08:10:57PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     Commit 99bafccc08919a5d640cb35962c4d730a2cad3a1 "Fix make
     distcheck" introduces the following:
     
         # This seems to be necessary as the libtool artifacts aren't removed
         # Automake bug ?
         tests_data_datasheet_test_CLEAN:
                 $(RM) -r tests/data

Clearly this rule is far too promiscuous.  I seem to remember it was a kludge
to work around a problem. Various .lib directories were not getting removed.
Thus, the make distcheck rule failed.
     
     There are a couple of problems with this.  First, $(RM) isn't
     defined on every system, and so sometimes it expands to the null
     string.  I'm not sure where it's defined, in fact, but Automake
     itself just uses "rm" all over, so I'm sure that it's OK to use
     plain "rm".  Second, if you run configure" in the source
     directory then this deletes datasheet-test.c and
     datasheet-test.sh, which is obviously a bad idea.  Finally, I
     think that -f is warranted in case the files in question haven't
     been built.

I always understood that $(RM) should be prefered.  It expands to "rm -f"
on POSIX systems an "DEL /Y" on windoze.
     
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