Re: Git help please - checking out old commit doesn't find lib/gnulib.mk.in.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Paul.

On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 13:23:37 -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > FWIW, I'm in Alan's camp: I can never remember which kind of "clean"
> > does what in the makefile.

> We could have a new rule ("make bootgit", say?) that does a "git clean -fdx" 
> followed by a "make bootstrap". This rule would be useful only for developers 
> who are using git.

And that would be utterly useless for me.  I have quite a few
non-registered files around my repositories, for example those used by
backup scripts, or diff files, or stdout/stderr from Emacs builds.

I do not want to get rid of these random files.  What I need to get rid
of are specifically those files which are preventing a build working.

>From the documentation, you would expect make bootstrap to do this.  It
doesn't.  make clean and make distclean fail because around 12 files in
m4/ are missing.  Why on earth are these make targets, which are solely
for deleting files, invoking m4 macros?

Why can Emacs not have a reliable way of cleaning up configuration and
build products (and _only_ these) such that a clean build can then be
done?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).