Re: "make maintainer-clean" inconsistency

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2024 14:31:19 +0200
> From: Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>
> 
> On Thu, Aug 08, 2024 at 08:46:37PM +0100, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > When I run "make maintainer-clean", there is a difference depending
> > on whether it is an out-of-source build.
> 
> My feeling is that maintainer-clean in an out of source build does not
> make much sense, and that we should not support it.  But that's a wild
> guess, I have never seen anything on that in the documentations and
> that's a subject I do not know much about.

>From the GNU Coding Standards manual:

  'maintainer-clean'
       Delete almost everything that can be reconstructed with this
       Makefile.  This typically includes everything deleted by
       'distclean', plus more: C source files produced by Bison, tags
       tables, Info files, and so on.

       The reason we say "almost everything" is that running the command
       'make maintainer-clean' should not delete 'configure' even if
       'configure' can be remade using a rule in the Makefile.  More
       generally, 'make maintainer-clean' should not delete anything that
       needs to exist in order to run 'configure' and then begin to build
       the program.  Also, there is no need to delete parent directories
       that were created with 'mkdir -p', since they could have existed
       anyway.  These are the only exceptions; 'maintainer-clean' should
       delete everything else that can be rebuilt.

       The 'maintainer-clean' target is intended to be used by a
       maintainer of the package, not by ordinary users.  You may need
       special tools to reconstruct some of the files that 'make
       maintainer-clean' deletes.  Since these files are normally included
       in the distribution, we don't take care to make them easy to
       reconstruct.  If you find you need to unpack the full distribution
       again, don't blame us.

       To help make users aware of this, the commands for the special
       'maintainer-clean' target should start with these two:

            @echo 'This command is intended for maintainers to use; it'
            @echo 'deletes files that may need special tools to rebuild.'

FWIW, I agree that this makes very little sense outside of the source
tree, because a better way in that case is simply to remove the build
tree, or switch to a clean tree for the subsequent build.